Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout

I didn’t realize this was going to be linked stories. There’s some irony to the fact that I didn’t really enjoy that. The pieces are linked tangentially through minor characters, geographically through their setting in Amgash, Illinois, and thematically (there’s a lot of sexual betrayal and indiscretion among the various kinds of pain explored in this book). But ultimately I want a novel to have a center of gravity and I couldn’t find one here. I felt like we were wandering rather than progressing. Which is a perfectly fine kind of book to write, but it’s not the kind I especially like to read.

Perfect Little World by Kevin Wilson

The story of Dr. Preston Grind, Izzy, and the Infinite Family Project–10 families living together and co-parenting all their children. Entertaining enough as books go, but it didn’t dig much beyond the premise. It lacks the endearing black comedy of The Family Fang.

Fresh Complaint by Jeffrey Eugenides

Most of these stories aren’t new. There are ten stories total. One or two I’d read before, and several have familiar characters (a doctor from Middlesex; boys from The Marriage Plot). None of them blew me away, although they were solid and enjoyable. I think Eugenides is at his best as a novelist, as none of these stories have the tightness, the economy that defines the very best of the form. Oddly, my favorite of the collection is (I think?) the oldest, from 1988 — “Capricious Gardens,” with the sort of classic set-up of an unlikely group of people arriving together in a house for the evening. Many of the others felt like they were snapshots, pieces of a larger world, which in some cases we know them to be, and in others, well, maybe they are and maybe they’re not. Who’s to say.

Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash

Reminded me of The Art of Fielding and The Goldfinch at the same time. (college sports; unhinged orphan). The narrator is a senior in college without any family or long-term plans or even goals past the current (final) wrestling season. He’s paranoid and unreliable–but I found myself worrying about him, if he’d be okay, even after I finished the book, so he must’ve done something right. It was also really quite suspenseful.

A House Among the Trees by Julia Glass

Richly drawn portrait of Tomasina, the assistant to famed children’s author/illustrator Mort Lear, who dies at the beginning of the book, and leaves Tommy his house–and responsibility for his estate. It resolves, present-plot-wise, around the bequest, or lack thereof, to a museum, but the real rich material is elsewhere, in the life of the actor who plays Mort in a movie, in Tommy’s childhood. I ultimately felt it had too many points of view; I’d have jettisoned the sad single museum curator. Maybe necessary for the plot to fully materialize, but a detriment to focus on the most compelling material.

Harlot’s Ghost by Norman Mailer

Mailer always writes with such authority that it’s hard to believe he wasn’t actually there in the room when these events occurred. There’s something very male about it. Set in the CIA in the late 50’s and early 60’s, along with a backdrop of the love story of Harry Hubbard and his distant cousin Kitteredge, who is married to his Godfather and sometimes boss. what could go wrong?

It’s an engrossing–and especially long–read. Perhaps too long, so that it started to feel that it lacked an overarching narrative and was instead a series of historical episodes loosely woven together. It ended rather abruptly–it seemed to be the death of JFK that brought things to a close, but he only became an important figure mid-way into the book.  I almost could have read it starting with the Cuba/Washington section, with a few flashbacks, that that would’ve been enough.

Mailer’s fictional versions of real historical characters are, as ever, fascinating.

All That’s Left to Tell by Daniel Lowe

Story about stories… Marc has been kidnapped in Pakistan and one of his captors is a woman who tells him stories, kind of a reverse Scheherezade. But the stories appear as if real– about his daughter, Claire, who was killed, and the life she lives after she survives the attack. Also the life Marc leads. Stories are told within that story too, and it becomes unclear what’s actually real, because of course, the whole thing is a story–a novel–and the different realities are both written as though real. Fascinating, and makes me think about stories and what they do to and for us.

The Purple Swamp Hen by Penelope Lively

Stories. Not the fashionable contemporary kind– often they have some sort of twist to them. All third person with some distance. Focused on relationships that don’t quite work for some reason, often a failure of communication. A lot of them kind of blurred together, especially toward the end, with their marriages or not-quite, women in their 30’s who are successful but something’s off. I enjoyed reading them but I’m not sure they’ll stay with me.

The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

A blend of true crime and memoir — the story of a murder, unrelated to the author’s life, that took place in the early 1990’s, and the author’s own childhood, during which she suffered sexual abuse. It’s pedophilia that ties the two stories together, both thematically and literally, for surely–even if this is never made quite explicit–that was what made her investigate this particular crime at such length. I wouldn’t have thought it would work, weaving the two together like that, but it seemed to. The writing is incredibly strong, and there is a link there. Dark stuff, but ultimately moving.

All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg

Entertaining, compulsively readable. Andrea, the woman who actually seems okay with being single at 40ish, gives us history of various incidents in her past, and we get to know her parents and some of her friends — Kevin, the neighbor; Indigo, the beautiful yoga teacher who marries a rich man. I wouldn’t say there’s a plot, but there is an arc, toward realizing that she remains an important part of her family and has obligations to them, that she can’t actually be alone. There’s also a thread about her life as an artist–abandoning it, maybe returning to it at the end–but that feels to me like an artificial overlay.