Elizabeth Finch

This short novel by Julian Barnes highlights what is best about the author: his impeccable prose style. It is a style that is neither fussy, nor showoffy, nor needlessly obscurantist, but rather flowing and calm (like a river with some shallows and a few depths). The title refers to an instructor the narrator, Neil, encountered in an adult education class on culture and civilization and who left an indelible mark on him. As in his novel about Shostakovich, I find Barnes does better with obscure and specific storylines – here it is Julian the Apostate at center – than he does with "love stories," which tend to fall into that English trap of being hopelessly trite. 

Who Killed My Father

Note the lack of a question mark in the title of this slim volume by the French writer Edouard Louis about his father. It is a scathing indictment of successive governments of France, starting with Chirac and running through Macron, for their treatment of the underclass. Louis's father, injured and disabled in his factory job, was made to travel dozens of miles to sweep streets to qualify for his pittance of disability. Louis here adds depth to the tough story of his upbringing that appeared in fictionalized form in The End of Eddy. The father, like many others in his position, blamed immigrants for his problems but now believes France needs a revolution. Louis deftly blends tenderness for his father with an unflinching look at his family's dysfunctions. His new book, about his mother, I expect will be as good.

The Last Days of Roger Federer

I am a fan of Geoff Dyer's novels, but his nonfiction has become a series of self-indulgent trips up the author's own ass. I am tired of reading about Dyer's tennis injuries, about taking drugs, about Burning Man. There is a footnote in this volume on his anxiety upon seeing a roll of toilet paper with only a few sheets left, for God's sake. Making connections is a sign of intelligence, and learning about them can make for enjoyable reading, but when the connections are obscure, tenuous and ingrown, the book needs to be thrown against a wall. There is a small amount of value here, directing a reader to other books and bits about Nietzsche and Beethoven, but much more that is unrewarding and tedious.

Down the Rabbit Hole

This work, a mere 70 pages, has been showered with praise but left me utterly cold. The first, and main, problem is the narration by a clever child. To me, such narrators are always just short of unendurable, Holden Caulfield being the prime example. To this unpleasant child, who has a penchant for denigrating "faggots," add a wisp of a plot that lacks any hook, and you're left with a dirty, grubby little thing and a reason to forget the name Juan Pablo Villalobos.

The Glass Hotel

Emily St. John Mandel proves again to be an engaging novelist with a fluid, transparent style. In trying to categorize her, I find the term "old-fashioned" comes to mind – as a compliment, not an epithet. This, like her previous Station Eleven, is well-plotted and not especially concerned with "big ideas," although there are enough smaller ideas to keep the pot bubbling. The use of supernatural elements never feels artificial, which is hard to pull off, and cameo appearances by characters from the previous novel are satisfying. Again, Mandel constructs a tight, propulsive, and believable plot (despite its fantastic elements). Old-fashioned, then, in the sense that the popular novels published by, say, Alfred A. Knopf in the 1920s were somewhat challenging but mostly just fun to read. 

Station Eleven

Emily St. John Mandel reveals herself in this post-apocalyptic novel to be a writer with a pleasing prose style and the ability to construct intricate and interesting plotlines that contain surprises and address weighty issues of civilization's fragility. There is the sense that Mandel is writing to be read, not writing for her own sake, or to show off.

An Island

This short novel by the South African author Karen Jennings came to my attention by being longlisted for the Booker Prize. Of all the titles and plot summaries included on the list, An Island seemed the most promising to me, and it did not disappoint. As a study of the effects of isolation and violence, it is astute; as an unfolding narrative switching back and forth in time, it is skillfully done.

The Book of Joan

Judging by a name I had never heard before, I assumed the author of this novel, Lidia Yuknavich, was from Eastern Europe and that the book had been translated. Turns out she is an American living in Oregon. At its simplest, The Book of Joan is a dystopian novel in which a ruined planet is abandoned by the wealthy who live in an orbiting station. Joan, a human savior figure, has tremendous and unexplained "superpowers" that derive from her connection to the soil. The author's prose, when it rings with clarity, is excellent. The messages, thinly veiled, warn of where the planet is heading both environmentally and politically. There is quite a bit more in the plot, but I'm not sure it was worth following down every rabbit hole. There is also a fair amount of gore, which was in fact refreshing.

Q&A

Edwin Torres followed up Carlito's Way with this crime novel, like the earlier book also made into an entertaining film. Torres has a great ear for dialogue and a talent for pacing. The time jumps to flesh out the characters' back stories are seamless and effective.

Mecca

This novel by Susan Straight offers insights into the Californian communities that live mostly in the shadows, at least from the point of view of the Anglo world. These are not immigrants in the common usage of the term, but people whose roots to the state date back in some cases hundreds of years. And yet they are still treated as aliens, outsiders, and dangerous. The book appears to have been fused together from several stories, and the welding joints are not smooth. Straight also has an annoying habit of spewing perfectly quotidian details, firehose style, as if they were pearls of wisdom. In a few moving passages the characters transcend archetype, but much of the novel fails to launch.