Just saying’
Hi! – As an author, I know how hard it is to write a novel. Furthermore, the novels I read and review are typically upmarket mainstream or works of literary suspense, and therefore of good quality. They have artistry to them, an interesting plot, engaging characters, and good use of language. Lastly, I’m rarely the first one to read a book; generally, I’ve read a good review or gotten a recommendation from someone. For all these reasons, my reviews ought all to be positive if not glowing. In fact, this is not always the case, though where I’m critical, please remember it’s still a good book that I’m commenting on. We all have our own taste.
Beyond taste, I try to offer something different in my reviews. I usually don’t spend words summarizing the novel. I do try to offer a few comments that I haven’t seen anywhere else, if only to contribute something new to whatever conversation is ongoing. Also, I read from a writer’s perspective, so occasionally my comments may not seem significant to non-writer readers. Sorry about that.
At the end of each review, I’ll give the book my star rating. My stars are similar to but more demanding than those used by Goodreads. Three stars (***) means I liked it, it was a good read. I only give four stars to something masterful in my opinion; e.g., The Immortalists. And for those rare books that knock my socks off, I’ll give five stars; e.g., The Mars Room.
Immediately below are my ratings, followed by the reviews in the same order.
The Wall by John Lanchester 3*
The Rooster Bar by John Grisham 3*
Once Upon A River by Diane Setterfield 3*
There, There by Tommy Orange 2*
The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner 5*
The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon 3*
The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin 4*
The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides 2*
The Guest Room by Chris Bohjalian 3.5*
Lights All Night Long by Lydia Fitzpatrick 5*
The Wall, by John Lanchester
I found this book interesting and moderately suspenseful, though not gripping. The novel takes place after a great and unnamed Change has occurred – sea level has risen dramatically. Lanchester describes what one island nation might do to sustain itself, and protect itself from refugees from nations that have been unable to sustain themselves, for whatever reason. Key is the construction of a wall going all the way around the island, and the conscription of Defenders to staff the wall. The fact that it doesn’t describe any other changes in the island nation makes the novel somewhat one-dimensional, but the author clearly wants to limit his vision to the wall and a few young people who defend it. We do learn that the younger generation despises their parents for causing the Change, but otherwise society seems to be ticking on as it always has.
The tone of the novel is bland, but I took his as a reflection of the mental state of the narrator, which is subdued at best, the mindset of someone who knows his world is inferior to the one his parents ruined, who feels cheated, but knows there is nothing much he can do about it. His world is broken, and this brokenness seems to extend into Kavanagh himself.
At the same time, there remains in him a modicum of human spirit, expressed by his interest in moving up and becoming one of the elite. He has no clear plans for how to do this, but does on one or two occasions rather kowtow to the baby politician, James, because he thinks it might help his upward mobility some day. His inability to plan for a good future is consistent with his inept social skills, in particular his difficulty in developing a relationship with Hifa. Despite his desire, he is almost totally passive when with her, and we see him let several opportunities to become closer go by. The relationship only gets real when Hifa bluntly says, “Do you want to breed with me?” (126)
A Moral Consideration
What becomes a source of drama in the novel is the existence of island citizens who want to help Others gain entrance—i.e., get over the wall—and who are viewed as traitors. Unfortunately, the novel never explores who these people are, as individuals, and why they do what they do. Given that their nation faces a real existential threat from the Change, those who help the Others must have strong reasons for their actions—e.g., very deep-seated beliefs that it’s immoral to turn away suffering refugees. Of course, had the author explored the beliefs of the traitors, it might well have turned the novel into something other than the dystopian adventure story it is. But my sense is that the novel might have been better for it.
While Kavanagh is dull in some respects and slow socially, he nevertheless shares a variety of interesting thoughts and observations. Once, after he and others are put to sea. He tells us that he was brought up not to think about the Others in terms of who they were or where they came from; they were just the Others. “But maybe, now that I was one of them, they weren’t Others anymore? If I was an Other and they were Others perhaps none of us were Others but instead we were a new Us. It was confusing.” While humorous, this rather weighty question of identity seems to be too much for Kavanagh. He doesn’t pursue it, and so its implications are never fleshed out.
What I Missed
One of the things that made this novel less real to me than Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which envisions another post-apocalyptic world, is that Kavanagh never seems to express deep emotion—fear of what’s happening, love for Hifa, or anything else. Overall, the characters and the entire novel felt numb to me. Except for a few battle scenes, I never felt much suspense. And while I was sympathetic with Kavanagh and Hifa, I wasn’t particularly attached to them. But curiosity about how the story would turn out kept me going.
As I got into the last section of the book—The Sea—I began to wonder how the author would end it. The plight of Kavanagh and Hifa is extreme; one or both could easily have died in any number of ways. Or perhaps the opposite could have happened, they might have found a safe haven—the author tempts us with this possibility after the captain tells them he knows how to get to such a place. In the end, they wind up in a kind of nowhere, where they can survive, at least for a long time, but only by remaining in a kind of prison where the only other inhabitant is mute and, though he can communicate after a fashion, seems to be suffering from some sort of mental trauma.
Leaving the characters here is perhaps fair, since the absurdity of their situation matches the overall absurdity of life on earth after the Change. At the same time, Kavanagh and Hifa seem satisfied with their situation. They are in a terrible place, but they are satisfied, and act as if they’ll never leave, at least not unless forced to. Which made me wonder, in the end, if their attitude reflects the infinite adaptability of the human species, or just the adaptability of a couple of relatively dull members of that species. ***
Inland, by Tea Obreht
Inland is the most literary novel I’ve read in a long time, which is to say there is a huge focus on language. Sentences often follow complex constructions, filled with detail. For example, instead of saying “the camel got up”, the narrative reads, “It unfolded like a dream making itself up as it went. Falteringly, it rocked forward and up and back, strutted one set of legs, one set of leathery thumbprint knees, and then the other, scaffolding itself, tilting its rider around as though he were just another protrusion of its own damnable anatomy. Up it went, with its mouth foaming and all the bloodcourses beneath its skin bulging.”
For me, this sort of prose, which demands careful reading, took some getting used to. Until I did, it made following the thread of the story challenging. Even then, I felt that the roiling flood of language made connecting with the drama of the events and the emotions of the characters largely impossible, at least until the climactic revelations toward the end. In other words, I like to feel a novel; I like to be affected. But then you can’t have everything. Here, I had Art, of the highest caliber.
I appreciated the way the novel continually served up depictions of western life in the late 1800s. Some, like the many descriptions of the effects of heat and drought (and being “sundrowned”) did a fine job of conveying the arid Arizona environment.
Other passages focused on people. One harangue by the cattle barron, Crace, provided what I felt was a keen insight into one class of denizens who helped formed the mindset of the West: “And I went on. Just me and the steers and a few cowhands who were hungry enough, or didn’t care which way their lives went, or were dead-set on outrunning whatever wife or warrant loomed over them back east.” (p311) Though the West was certainly settled by a wide variety of people, those described here by Crace were not men who clung to the strictures of ordinary society. While not outlaws of the train-robbing variety, they liked to make their own rules, which helps explain the conservative/libertarian strongholds of ranchland country, and the attitude of modern outlaws like Cliven Bundy.
Plot Issues
One could argue that the way Toby’s “beast” turns up and wreaks such havoc on Nora’s home is contrived, since neither Nora nor anybody in Amargo has done anything to attract it. Why here? Why now? Similarly, the way Lurie is able to see the dead, and feels compelled by them to steal the things they want, didn’t engage my interest because I didn’t have much reason to care about the dead people he could see. On the other hand, Nora conversing with her dead daughter was powerful. It said a lot about her life and how it came to be crippled in the way it was, especially after we learn how Evelyn died. It made her immensely sympathetic.
The story embedded in the novel is difficult to grasp, partly because of the highly literary language and the interweaving of its two main story strands. But it is a classic onion, with elements like Emmett’s disappearance, initially portrayed as nothing more than him going for water, taking on great significance as more is revealed later on. The way everything comes to a head in the last quarter of the book, especially the way Nora realizes she has inadvertently caused a second tragedy, is a fair reward for the reader who sticks with the book.
A Reader’s Reward
The greater reward, of course, is exposure to prose that seems without equal, all of it leading up to Nora’s tour de force vision of past, present and future in the last pages of the book. Kind of takes your breath away. This is the kind of writing that makes people buy books, just to have it around to re-read from time to time.
Among all the fine passages in this novel, one resonated strongly for me as I read it during the tense moments with Iran in early January 2020, after the Mad King decided to play Assassinator-in-Chief. It comes when Nora is revealing how Evelyn died. She mistook the approach of a friend for Indians and ran terrified out into a field under a boiling sun and stayed too long.
Dark rider. Spotted horse. She thought Apache because the word had been growing in her like an illness all her life, but especially since the cavalry had raided that Rancheria about a month back, and word of their doings had drifted to town with all the usual directness: buffalo fat and a bonfire that climbed and whistled and singed even the edges of the dead. While her neighbors mulled over when and upon whom the Apache would visit retribution, so swift and so very disproportionate, Nora had sat quietly and thought: disproportionate? I’d do it to you, too. Your tongue and your eyes. Your guts pulled out in streamers, if it were my children cut down and left to dry in the sun. (p327)
The tragedy of her own reckless act, caused by fear, ignorance and misunderstanding, is conflated here with a massacre visited by the cavalry upon an Apache Rancheria, so that she is left with a violent thirst for vengeance. In the moment, it struck me as a metaphor for our own present situation, as if the human race is fated to repeat the same mistakes born of fear and misunderstanding forever. ****
The Rooster Bar by John Grisham
The best thing about The Rooster Bar, at least the first hundred pages or so, was its focus on for-profit law schools, and the way they saddle willing students with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt in exchange for mediocre educations and/or worthless degrees. Because the novel opens at the beginning of the characters’ last semester in Foggy Bottom, we don’t get to see much of the thinking that led them to take on such suffocating levels of debt. But from the characters’ musings, a lot of it was of the wishful variety.
At the same time, the deceptive advertisements of the schools come off as equally if not more to blame, along with the irresponsible lending practices of the federal Department of Ed. Altogether, the novel provides a fine portrait of the way relatively innocent and ignorant kids can be bamboozled by adults who ought to know better and have more decency. If there was one shortcoming in the novel for me, it was that it didn’t provide a fuller picture of what happened to sleazebag Rackley after they sent Gordon’s thumb drive to the New York Times. For all the reader knows, despite his “Rackley University” fraud, he might have ended up getting elected President.
A Slow Start
Aside from its useful social commentary, the novel took a long time to gain traction in my mind. There just wasn’t much tension in the opening chapters, and even Gordon’s suicide was kind of ho-hum. I suppose the reader came to understand the three characters through these slow chapters, but I wonder if it had to take so long. I was on page 111 before I committed to seeing the novel through. I’d thought about quitting several times but didn’t have anything else lying around that I was hot to read.
Once the kids formed their phony law firm and began hustling clients in court hallways, the pace picked up. Tension was ever-present because Mark and Todd never knew from day to day whether they’d get clients and make money, or get neither, or be outed as frauds. Their willingness to take ever greater risks, their cavalier attitude toward the law, and their chutzpah when dealing with the Rackley gang and other bankers, was kind of endearing. They were resourceful and creative, kind of like a modern day Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid who went to Senegal instead of Bolivia.
This was an entertaining novel once it got going, like many Grisham novels. It flows quickly, almost completely unburdened by similes, metaphors, imagery or any other form of artistic language. It is all story. And by highlighting the problem of predatory for-profit schools, it provided useful a public service. ***
Once Upon A River by Diane Setterfield 
Once Upon A Time Upon A River was an enjoyable read, told in the voice of what I would call a wise grandmother; or, as others have said, told like a fairy tale. Stylistically it reminded me somewhat of novels by Thomas Hardy, although without the extended descriptions of setting that authors had to provide in the days before film and TV. Also like Hardy, the novel was set in rural England and featured rustic characters. Unlike Hardy, character wasn’t destiny; stuff happens, magical and otherwise, and the characters play only a minor role in determining it.
In general, I found the novel engaging. It held my attention, and although a key part of the mystery – the girl who comes alive again and then disappears – was dealt with in a fantastical manner, it didn’t bother me much. It was nothing like certain contemporary mysteries that wait until halfway through a book (if not ninety-five percent of the way) to hit the reader with a “twist” that changes everything, a cheap trick that some seem to enjoy for reasons I can’t begin to understand. Indeed, the mystery of the appearing and disappearing girl is a gentle one, and the willingness of the local populace to explain it away with fantastical beliefs I took as an indication of the level of hinterland sophistication, in England in the later 1800s.
Misgivings?
I thought making Armstrong black and good to the bone was an interesting choice. Even more interesting was the fact that everybody other than Victor, the Essence of Evil, was good-hearted and always ready to come to each other’s aid. Ah, the good old days!
To repeat, I enjoyed the tale. It was slow to develop, but I understand it takes time to introduce a cast of characters. By keeping most chapters quite short, the author was able to encourage the reader along. Still, there were a lot of characters, and no single protagonist. This latter fact, I think, diminished the tension in the novel. Having a sort of “shared” hero – a Vaughn-Daunt-Armstrong conglomeration – made it difficult to root for anybody. And the way the points-of-view shifted from chapter to chapter also interrupted the rise of tension. So in the end, while I was glad V-D-A triumphed, I wasn’t excited about it. No fireworks went off. ***
There, There by Tommy Orange 
I appreciated the way this book shines a spotlight on urban Native Americans, and makes clear the challenges that they face as a result of losing their traditional identify to waves of European immigrants. The book implies that many urban Native Americans want to re-assert their cultural identity, here by attending or dancing at a powwow.
Character Issues
I had trouble following the story because there are so many characters (I counted at least 30 named characters), because at least six characters speak as first person narrators, and because there is only a faint plot line moving the book forward. I finally had to create a scorecard with all of the character names and relationships in order to get grounded.
I had the impression that I was reading a series of Native American character sketches. All of the character sketches were well done, and the characters we meet when they were young, particularly Jacquie Red Feather, and then meet decades later, I could understand with some depth. But most of the characters we only glimpse for a brief period of their lives, so I didn’t feel that I knew or understood them.
Plot Issues
For most of this fiction there is very little tension. We know that there is going to be a powwow at the Oakland Coliseum, and we know that some of the characters are going to rob it in order to settle some drug debts. Finally the story arrives at the powwow, the robbery predictably goes wrong, there is a lot of shooting and people dying. And the book abruptly ends.
I wasn’t sure what to make of this piece. There was a fair amount of good writing in the character sketches and at the end, when the narration is inside the heads of various people being shot and dying. Here, I felt like I was reading something new and different and captivating, although it also seemed gratuitous in that it didn’t add anything meaningful. And the abrupt ending, was that supposed to be a metaphor for urban Native life? **
The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner 
I was halfway through with this novel when I recommended it to the wife of my best friend when they were visiting one weekend. I knew she was a reader and had been in a book club for many years. She hadn’t heard of the book. Later it occurred to me that it might not be her cup of tea. It brings the reader into a world that isn’t pretty, and that is filled with characters who are rough and lewd and violent. I can see why some readers would react negatively to plunging into this world, though the crusader in me hopes that they would be few in number, because if we refuse to open our eyes to the troubled aspects of our world, how can we ever expect to improve it?
I found this to be one of the most stunning books I’ve ever read. The voice of the main character, Romy, is addictive. Her revelations and observations keep coming, like punches:
At the Mars Room, I did not have to show up on time, or smile, or obey any rules, or think of most men as anything other than losers to be exploited but who believed they were exploiting us, and so it was quite hostile as an environment . . . Some girls, as part of their routine, spent the first several hours of their shifts nodding off in the dressing room with a makeup compact in one hand. There was no problem with that. The management did not care. There were girls who worked the audience in the standard uniform of lace bra and panties but with ratty broken-down tennis shoes instead of high heels. If you’d showered you had a competitive edge at the Mars Room. If your tattoos weren’t misspelled you were hot property.
The Toll of Poverty
The novel makes clear how poverty and neglect contribute powerfully to so many of the women who end up in prison with Romy. Perhaps the worst effect of poverty was Romy’s assignment to a public defender who was somehow unable to convince her trial judge to allow him to introduce evidence that the man she killed had been stalking her, and was so much a threat to her that she moved from San Francisco to L.A. to get away from him. The unfairness of this is mind-boggling, yet the novel does not seem to suggest that better outcomes are possible, if only because the murder Romy commits is equally mind-boggling.
About halfway through the novel I began to wonder how Kushner could possibly arrive at a satisfying ending to Romy’s story. She is serving two consecutive life sentences, and won’t be eligible for parole for 37 years. And if she manages to get paroled from her first life sentence, she will simply start serving her second. Because she seemed to be a sympathetic character to me, I wanted an ending that was fair to her. But of course it was too late for fairness to play a role in her life.
Kudos to Rachel Kushner for shining a spotlight on aspects of our world that deserve our attention. We can do better. *****
The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon
I particularly liked the fact that this novel’s action was centered around a significant social issue of our time, abortion and its sometimes violent opposition. Given the current state of society, it is vitally important for the most thoughtful people in the world—writers—to address these issues, and help us understand the minds of those with differing perspectives.
Style Trumps Feeling
I found the novel to be more enjoyable on my second go-round. On my first read-through, I struggled with the unconventional narrative style, in that it interfered with my ability to experience a “continuous dream” in the fiction. I felt as if the author got between me and the characters, so that I couldn’t feel them or empathize with them. On second read, knowing the story, these issues diminished, but not completely. Because the events in this story are emotionally alarming for the characters, I wanted to feel more, but I couldn’t.
This is a powerful story, but some might view it as another version of a messiah-and-follower story, and therefore unoriginal. Perhaps the author used the style she did as a way to try to make the story new. That is her right, and there are passages of fine writing in the novel. But overall, it didn’t work for me. ***
The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin 
I started out with mixed feelings about this book, but felt it got better as it went along. After an introductory set-up with a mysterious gypsy who tells each of four siblings the date they will die, the novel is split into four sections, one for each character.
In the first section, about Simon, the reader can guess that his death is a foregone conclusion, so that to me his story almost seemed like non-fiction. He was, as his lover Robert said, fearless, and he fought to live his own life (with a little encouragement from sister Klara). What stood out for me was how Simon celebrated his sexual freedom with a recklessness that was not perverted but flowed naturally after a lifetime of suppression; I thought the author portrayed this dynamic intelligently, along with the idea that AIDS was not, in Simon’s time, known to be transmitted through unprotected sex, meaning that Simon and other infected men were truly innocent victims.
What Happened to Klara?
In the second section, I found Klara to be an endearing and powerful character; I wanted her to succeed. Maybe I wasn’t reading carefully enough, but I didn’t buy her suicide. I didn’t see that she had sufficient motivation to do it, especially with a one-year-old daughter. To me, a parent is instinctively willing to die for their child and thus highly unlikely to commit suicide, except perhaps under extraordinary circumstances (e.g., severe mental illness). Klara may have had some problems, but were they that severe? I’ll have to re-read. Maybe I didn’t see because I didn’t want to.
Daniel’s story was interesting and somehow believable. He was honorable (in his resistance to his commander’s demands); he was clearly intelligent; and yet he took the gypsy’s prophecy to heart, and allowed it to eventually become the obsession that destroyed him.
An Artistic Triumph
I felt that the last section, about Varya, was absolutely stunning in the way it wove together so many perspectives on life—on how to live, on the fragility of life, on what we owe to life itself and to each other—and did so with elegant simplicity. There is tremendous pathos evoked here, for Varya and her struggles with OCD, for her inability to let herself love, and for Frida, a kind of doppelganger for Varya herself, locked in a cage and harming herself, slowly moving toward death.
I could feel this narrative in my chest, and appreciated the way the author closed the novel with a series of hopeful episodes – the possibility that Varya may develop a relationship with her son; her meeting with Robert, who assuages her guilt and tells her to act like Simon and be fearless; the re-marriage of Mira; and Ruby’s magic show. This portion of the book gets 5+ stars from me.
As I write this, looking back through the novel, I realize there are far too many highlights for me to even begin to mention. There are sentences throughout that are beautifully written, there are many effective images, and the characters’ interior thoughts add much depth to the novel. Moreover, the author provides us with all these beauties in a book that is an easy, enjoyable read. It is a novel that deserves more than one reading – something I will enjoy doing. ****
The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides
The most disappointing aspect this novel was the blurb on the cover from AJ Finn calling it the “perfect thriller”. Since Finn’s The Woman in the Window was truly outstanding, I expected to be similarly entertained by The Silent Patient. I wasn’t.
I generally give a book 100 pages to make me interested enough to finish it. This one took me until page 83 before I decided to see it through. It was not gripping. The narrative voice is bland, utterly unlike the witty, amazing voice in AJ Finn’s book.
Narrative Problems
The premise of this novel (which I won’t reveal) is acceptable. It is the way the story is told that I object to. There is a difference between an unreliable narrator and an unreliable author. The unreliable narrator withholds important information, but nevertheless leaves a reader with enough clues to suspect a different truth than the one he or she offers. One of the fun ways to do this is with an exotic narrator – i.e., one who clearly disturbed by drugs or alcohol (Finn, again), or is just a little mentally wacky. The suspicious reader is eventually rewarded with an “Ah ha, I knew it” sort of moment, which is quite satisfying. An unreliable author, on the other, provides few or no clues that he or she is unreliable, so that plot twist hits the reader like a slap in the head. Not satisfying. Bewildering, at best.
This novel had a good premise and some good development. With decent plotting, it could have succeeded. I’m disappointed. **
The Guest Room by Chris Bohjalian
Chris Bohjalian does just about everything right in this novel. Child sex trafficking is a particularly deplorable crime, and Bohjalian does the public a service in shining a light on it. By having about a third of the book told by Alexandra, one of the child sex slaves, he manages to both humanize her and bring home for the reader the extent of the horror and abuse that she has faced.
This novel generated a visceral response in me along the lines of, How can the Russian mobsters live with themselves? And Why don’t the FBI and other law enforcement agencies do more to stop these criminals? Simple-minded questions, and a reminder that the world is not fair or a pleasant place for so many who live in foreign lands. Then, too, although the issue isn’t much mentioned in the novel, it clearly implies that there is a demand in the U.S. for this sort of “entertainment”. As with drug trafficking, American consumers bear much responsibility something we deplore.
Effective Writing
Beyond subject matter, I appreciated the quality of Bohjalian’s prose. He builds depth into his characters by articulating all manner of personal details, and that made the characters sympathetic as far as I was concerned. I wanted them to come through their traumatic experience chastened but renewed.
I also felt that the novel did a good job portraying the fallout of the bachelor party—all the ways in which Richard’s world broke down, piece by piece. It almost seemed unfair, because what happened was so improbable that Richard couldn’t be blamed for not foreseeing what would happen when he agreed to host the party. At the same time, the reaction of his wife, his daughter, the school, and his employer all made sense. A classic case of bad things happening to good people.
If I had one quibble, it would be with Richard’s actions at the very end, which struck me as dumb rather than noble, as a mistake rather than an honorable act. But this is a minor quibble, and I’m not sure I could identify an ending that would be any better. This was a story that featured ugly crimes by ugly people, and Richard was essentially an innocent caught unexpectedly in a situation he wasn’t capable of handling. ***1/2*
Lights All Night Long by Lydia Fitzpatrick
To me, this is a novel that expertly weaves three significant plot lines – Ilya coming to America, the mystery of three murders, and Vladimir’s drug addiction – along with the stories of several other significant characters – Maria Michailovna and her husband Dmitri, Gabe Thompson, plus Sadie and the mother who abandoned her. All of these plotlines are skillfully handled so that they come together in the end. Similarly, all of these characters, as well as those of Ilya’s and Sadie’s families, come to the reader as distinct individuals. This is a world, or two worlds, that come alive.
The central character, Ilya, is beset by a conflict. Although he wants to go to America and seems to recognize it as an opportunity that can change his life for the better, he nevertheless cares more about his wayward brother Vladimir, and about being accepted by Vladimir and his circle of drug using friends. He even sacrifices taking his exams and is willing to do krokodil to gain their acceptance. It’s only Vladimir’s intelligence, his recognition of Ilya’s potential, that saves Ilya from doing drugs and losing his chance to go to America. In a nice twist, although Ilya wants very much to save his brother throughout the novel, it is his brother who saves him.
Parallel Worlds
The similarities between Russia and America are striking, particularly, I think, for those of us who tend to think America is unequivocally superior to Russia. The comparison of Berlozhniki with Leffie works on many levels. It begins when Papa Cam pulls into “a cul-de-sac where a lone house bit a chunk out of the sky. It was as graceless as a kommunalka.” Moreover, just as Ilya’s mother works in a refinery, so too Papa Cam works in a refinery. Both refineries are visible from the characters’ homes. This is not to say there aren’t differences, as when Ilya notes about the Mason’s house: “the house did seem like something on TV. It was all polish; it lacked dimension, it lacked the smells and sounds and smudges that were life in the kommunalkas.”
The most obvious parallel between America and Russia appears in the ravages of drug use. Individuals close to Ilya and Sadie are affected, which brings the issue into the foreground and makes it personal rather than an abstract societal problem.
I particularly enjoyed the depiction of the Mason’s church. Initially, the church and pastor are presented in almost perverse terms: “The pastor looked like a porn star . . .[his] sermon was a mishmash of sound bites.” But at the end of the novel, the congregation generously takes up a collection to fund Vladimir’s stay in America, and Pastor Kyle recommends Tomorrow’s Sunrise as a facility that can help Sadie’s mom escape her addiction.
Fine Writing
Perhaps what I appreciated most was the quality of the prose; on every page it’s rich and detailed in its descriptions of people and places. Also, in a novel that is quite serious in its intent, there is nevertheless a steady stream of subtle and not-so-subtle humor, as when Ilya comments about the Mason’s pool: “But he hadn’t ever thought of this: in America they light their pools…” Or Vladimir on the shopkeeper: “Did you see his mouth? He looks like he’s been sucking cock for a decade.” Or Babushka telling Ilya, “Even you can’t make English sound pretty.”
If I were to have any quibble with this excellent novel, it would be with Ilya, whom I didn’t feel a lot of sympathy for because he always seemed relatively passive. His academic success came so easily that it didn’t seem like a real achievement, and even his most dramatic action—driving to see Gabe—came off rather easily. To me, Vladimir was the more interesting brother, and heroic in his secretly recording Dmitri’s subterfuge. But this is a minor shortcoming in a novel that is noteworthy for so many other impressive attributes. *****
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