Books Smitten

The Best Books of 2023

10. The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

The story of two sisters in occupied France, this is a gripping mix of Resistance history, wartime domesticity, and romance. Isabelle, the plucky heroine, joins a secret group that helps captured Allied soldiers escape through the Pyrenees. Her sister Vianne raises a Jewish child as her own after his parents are deported. Both have love interests, but it is fundamentally a story about the role women played in WW2. I’m not someone who cries easily, but I was sobbing by the end of this book. After The Great Beyond and this, Kristin Hannah is one of those big authors whose name I trust.

9. Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith

While known primarily as a singer/songwriter, Patti Smith is also a remarkably gifted writer. This is my third read of hers, and it won’t be my last. At New Year’s, after a show at the Fillmore, Patti goes to a hotel in Santa Cruz. She mingles with locals, catalogs her dreams, and accepts a ride south from strangers. I haven’t read The Beats, but I have a feeling this is inspired by Kerouac. It’s not really clear what is reality, dream, memoir. Whatever this story is, it was gripping from one page to the next.

8. Morning Sun in Wuhan by Ying Chang Compestine

A lovely story about how food brings people together, this joins a growing list of novels inspired by the Covid 2020 lockdowns. 13-year-old Mai has lost her mother and rarely sees her father, a doctor at a hospital in Wuhan, China, when the pandemic hits, shutting schools and all but essential businesses. Mai spends her days playing video games with friends online and cooking for herself in an empty apartment. Her loneliness is punctuated by the sounds of a girl upstairs practicing piano. After witnessing hot meals being dropped off for shut-ins, Mai is inspired to volunteer as a cook at her favorite restaurant. The charming coming-of-age story is accompanied by recipes.

7. The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave

Hannah Hall is a woodworker living on a floating home in Sausalito, CA, with her husband, Owen and teenage stepdaughter, Bailey. When her husband’s tech company is investigated by the SEC, he disappears, leaving a duffel bag full of cash and a note that reads Protect Her. Hannah and Bailey travel to Austin to uncover who Owen really was. This is a well-paced suspense novel with some charming local Austin detail. Unlike a lot of titles in this category, it has the feel of something that might actually happen. The epilogue gave me chills.

6. Feel The Bern by Andrew Shaffer

I would not have predicted a year ago that a cozy mystery would be on my Best Of 2023 list, but it just shows that something done right can appeal to a lot of people. Crash (named after Kevin Costner’s character in Bull Durham) is a recent college grad who lands a coveted internship with Senator Bernie Sanders and accompanies him on a stump speech stop to her hometown of Eagle Creek, Vermont. Before you can say Jessica Fletcher, a local turns up dead in the lake, his lungs filled with maple syrup. In addition to being a charming mystery, it is full of details about Vermont and syrup making. (Alternate title: The Sugar Makers) I really enjoyed it.

5. Fly Girl by Ann Hood

Due to a mild fear of flying, I could never be a flight attendant. Perhaps because of this, I find the job tantalizing in a way that is reserved for things that are forbidden. (The power of denial, as Liane Moriarty once wrote.) Ann Hood is the perfect person to chronicle the profession, as she is a chatty memoir writer with a journalist’s eye for particular detail. This is full of her personal stories as a TWA flight attendant in the 1970s and 1980s — the meal service detail alone was fascinating — and also full of fun facts about the profession. 75% of flight attendants are female. (And, yes, most male flight attendants are gay.) The first flight attendant created the jump seat because of her concern about passengers opening the cabin door. And the song “Sara Smile” by Hall & Oates was written for a flight attendant. I loved nearly every minute of this throughly entertaining chronicle of a flight attendant’s life.

4. Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park

Perhaps because of the title, I picked this up at a bookstore expecting to be annoyed by it. Do I need to read a cotton candy story about gay sex in Seoul? As it turns out, this is not at all what I thought it would be. In fact, it is a beautifully written, slightly dark story of a gay man’s triumphs and trials. The proverbial original voice has been found! I would re-read it just to experience that haunting final line again.

3. Sankofa by Chibundu Onuzo

A compelling story about midlife reinvention, this novel tells the story of a biracial woman, Anna, who discovers information in her late mother’s journals about her biological father, a man she never knew. After deciding to visit him, she is forced to deal with the peculiarities of meeting a VIP family of strangers. The setting, a politically unstable West African nation, was intriguing and I couldn’t help but root for Anna.

2. Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yahisawa

I have a weakness for charm, in people and in books. This slim novel has an enchanting quality that is hard to put into words. After her boyfriend casually dumps her for another woman, Takako agrees to move into her uncle’s ramshackle used book store in a neighborhood in Tokyo populated with hundreds of specialty bookshops. (Apparently this is a real place called Jimbocho.) She’s not a reader, and spends most of her time sleeping in the loft. Slowly, though, she warms to the pleasures of books and new adventures. I love it when novels unfold in acts, and the final stretch of this is magical. This story made me want to visit Japan.

On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

This novel was so beautifully written that I couldn’t give the top spot to anyone else. It is pure poetry, a work of fiction that reads like a memoir and slowly guides the readers through the relationship between a son and his barely literate mother. The dislocation of immigrants, the alienation of queer youth, and the cruel beauty of life are rendered through the most evocative prose I’ve read this year. This really is a masterpiece.

The Blahs of 2023

I’m convinced that every author, from the prodigiously talented to the mediocre, works their heart out to finish their stories. For that reason, I give bad reviews with pause. I’m not sure there even are bad books so much as there are bad matches between the writer and reader. AS Byatt wrote, “Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.” Alas, this intimacy can be awkward sometimes. Here is my list of three books that gave me the blahs in 2023.

Daisy Darker

I’ll start with the most surprising title: Daisy Darker by Alice Feeney. If you look back a bit on this blog, you will see that in the not-so-distant past, Rock Paper Scissors by the same author was my very favorite title of the year. I’m sorry to report that I just did not care for this one. It has a particularly ghoulish plot, with adult family members meeting for a birthday party at a remote island estate and dying off one by one. Throughout the evening, on the hour, a body is discovered, their deaths seemingly forecast in a lengthy poem that appears written on the walls. The characters are poorly drawn (one is memorable only because she dresses like Audrey Hepburn) and it’s not clear why they hate each other so much. The twist ending is highly derivative, and given the movies it copies from, it will be easy to spot for a lot of suspense movie viewers. About the only thing I liked about it was the setting: a Cornish island which is accessible only during low tide. The rest of it was tedious.

2. Left On Tenth

Another unlikely disappointment is Delia Ephron’s Left on Tenth. After losing her husband to cancer, the author finds love again after writing a New York Times op-ed about her frustrations with Verizon. A kindly man from the Bay Area writes her an engaging and flirtatious email about his own experiences, and soon they fall in love and marry, dividing their time between the coasts. Then the unthinkable happens: Delia is diagnosed with incurable cancer.

The set-up to this memoir is excellent, but after she gets sick (and, miraculously, cured) it becomes a curiously listless story about facing death and having extraordinary good luck in remission. I don’t know why it left me cold, but I didn’t enjoy it. I think the author was trying to do two things here: write an engaging senior romance and a gutting story about death, but the combination simply didn’t work for me.

3. The Unraveling of Cassidy Holmes

This was another one I expected to enjoy but ended up slogging through. Cassidy Holmes falls for a male boy-band singer when they compete against each other in a competitive reality show similar to American Idol. After he assaults her, Cassidy bears the brunt of the bad publicity that follows. It all feels very relevant in the #metoo era. The problem is that it start off darkly in a way that leaves no room for triumph. And, more frustratingly, it actually becomes boring, after Cassidy goes home to her mother’s house.

Reading Fun Facts: 2023

One of my favorite things about reading is the small tidbits and fun facts you learn along the way. It’s always a sign that a book is worth reading when you happen upon a kernel of information that you haven’t heard before. Here are a few things I learned from books this year:

You know when you notice something new and then suddenly you begin seeing it everywhere? In the age of algorithms it’s not entirely organic, but there is no denying that there is a creepy coincidence that occurs after you hear about something for the first time and then begin noticing it repeatedly. It happened to me recently when I saw a movie starring a woman named Maike Monroe. I had never heard of her before, but suddenly I was coming across references to her everywhere: her filmography, a surreptitious photo of her kissing her boyfriend at a Paris cafe. Turns out there is a named for this: the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Try an elk taco for the first time? Now sit back and watch while you notice references to it in strange places. And now that I’ve introduced Baader-Meinhof to you, let it commence and you will start hearing about it more and more.
In Brooklyn Heights, there are three streets named after fruit: Cranberry, Pineapple, and Orange. The first was the location of a house that Cher lived in in the movie Moonstruck. The second, Pineapple, was the inspiration for a recent novel. And on nearby Willow Street, Truman Capote rented a basement where he wrote Breakfast At Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood.

3. 75% of flights attendants are women. (And, yes, the majority of male flight attendants are gay.) Not surprising stats, but what is interesting is that the jump seat was designed by the first flight attendant, Ellen Church, after she was concerned that a passenger might open the cabin door.

4. Speaking of flight attendants, the weight restrictions on them weren’t lifted until 1991, after smoking allowances (1990) and age restrictions (1968).

5. TWA first-class (circa 1979) served chateaubriand (carved up by the flight attendant) mixed greens salad, specialty cocktails, and a sundae bar.

6. On another (now defunct) airline there was the “Air Strip”… in which flight attendants started the flight in a cape, then removed it in full view of passengers to reveal a Pucci suit, and later stripped down to a yellow serving dress.

7. The woman who inspired “Sara Smile” by Hall and Oates was a flight attendant who dated Daryl Hall for decades. She also inspired their lesser-known song “Las Vegas Turnaround.” A turnaround schedule is one in which stewardesses fly back and forth to and from the same city within a day.

8. The Maple Belt in Vermont is slowly shifting north due to climate change. Since maple trees only produce sap when temperatures are below freezing at night and above freezing during the day, US sugar makers may see their businesses closing and the global market relying on Canadian syrup.

9. In her novel Heartburn, Nora Ephron has a character say, “Pasta is the quiche of the ’80s.” Another character describes a woman as “thin, pretty, big tits. Your basic nightmare.” These lines were later repurposed as dialogue for Bruno Kirby and Carrie Fisher in Ephron’s screenplay When Harry Met Sally.

10. And, finally, a not-so-fun fact: according to Andrew Morton, Mick Jagger was obsessed with Angelina Jolie at the tail end of his marriage to Jerry Hall. He left impassioned voice mails on Angie’s mother’s phone after Angie gave him a false number. He also had bandmate Charlie Watts call her on his behalf. And, even more creepily, in Mackenzie Phillips’ High on Arrival she describes being seduced by Jagger just after she turned eighteen. He had known her since she was ten (he was a close friend of her father, John Phillips) and told her he had been waiting for her to become legal before he made his moves on her.

Autumn Chills

As summer turned into fall, I found myself returning again and again to the mystery/suspense genre. PD James has opined that people like mysteries because they create an inviolable world in which justice is inevitably served. I think my own interest may be more pedestrian than that. I enjoy seeing where the author is taking me, and what I learn along the way.

Here are three recent reads in the genre and what I thought of them:

Defined as a murder solved amidst a contained, usually small community (think of Jessica Fletcher in Cabot’s Cove), cozy mysteries tend to spare the reader too much gore or graphic sex as well. I usually steer clear of them due to a childhood aversion to Murder, She Wrote. However, this one caught my eye and held my attention, even briefly turning me into a fan.

Crash (named after Kevin Coster’s character in Bull Durham) is a recent college grad who lands a coveted internship with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. She has no sooner been hired than the senior senator agrees to give a stump speech in her hometown of Eagle Creek, Vt. After they arrive, a body is fished out of a local lake. The autopsy reveals that the vic’s lungs were filled with maple syrup. Crash and her boss put their heads together and investigate the crime. Suspects include Crash’s cousin (who smells suspiciously of maple syrup), the local mayor, and a bevy of small town ladies.

The story was entertaining with a few twists along the way. It was also informative. I learned quite a bit about how maple syrup is made and marketed. Bernie Sanders is a surprisingly entertaining sleuth. I’d be happy for another visit sometime.

Hannah Hall is a woodworker living on a floating home in Sausalito with her husband, Owen, and teenage stepdaughter, Bailey. When news breaks that Owen’s tech company is being investigated by the feds, Owen disappears, leaving a duffel bag of cash and a note to Hannah that says Protect her.

As she struggles to understand why her husband has fled, Hannah discovers that his life story is fictionalized. Hannah takes Bailey to Austin, TX, after the teen has some vague memories of being at a sports game and a wedding there. As they piece together who Owen really was, Hannah and Bailey form a bond and find themselves in danger.

I was reminded a bit of Harlan Coben as I read this. If you know my reading habits, that is very high praise. The Last Thing He Told Me is a suspenseful and ultimately satisfying story about why people live double lives and the people left in the wake of them.

Paloma comes home one night to her San Francisco apartment and finds her roommate dead. We know that he had been blackmailing her and that Paloma has a drinking problem, so when the police show up and find no body, it all sounds about right. This is one of those novels that doesn’t hide from the reader that the narrator may be unreliable. That’s OK for a while.

The novel switches back and forth between Paloma’s current investigation and her girlhood in Sri Lanka, where she is ultimately adopted by a Bay Area couple. As her paranoia about her roommate increases, Paloma goes to her parents’ home, where she encounters some disturbing things. A neighbor lurks around, dropping off a copy of Paloma’s favorite book Wuthering Heights. A friend of her parents invites Paloma over with great urgency, but then goes missing. And peculiar things are happening around the house, with ties to Paloma’s Sri Lankan memories.

This is all pretty scary, and hinges on the possibility that Paloma is mentally ill. There is also another fairly obvious explanation, which won’t be a surprise to anyone who reads regularly in this genre. By the end there are some laughable implausibilities and a final scene that aspires to cinematic greatness, but just comes off as derivative.

Overall this was pretty entertaining, but not enough to rate a rave.

Reading Around The Map: East Asia

One of the undeniable pleasures of reading is the fact that it allows you to cross borders without leaving your couch. Such was my experience in the last month in which I read three books set in different Asian countries. Each of them showed me a part of a country I know little about in ways that were enriching and surprising.

Morning Sun in Wuhan by Ying Chang Compestine was a delightful young adult novel about the ways that food brings people together. Thirteen-year-old Mei is grieving the loss of her mother as the novel opens. Her father, a doctor, is often absent. Her aunt, her mother’s sister, is absent due to an argument that happened at the funeral. Mei is left alone to play video games with some online friends. As the lockdown in 2020 closes her city, Mei begins cooking as a way to nourish herself and keep her mind off things. Soon, she volunteers at a restaurant near the hospital where her father works. Her food delivery brings her closer to residents of her city, including a lonely girl upstairs who plays piano. While this might sound kink of hokey, it is charmingly written (with real recipes) and Mei is a winning heroine.
Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park is a story that is both familiar and foreign. Young is a recent college graduate living in Seoul, partying with his hetero life companion, Jaehee. When she uncharacteristically decided to get married, Young is on his own, longing for love but aware of his own limitations. While caring for his dying mother, memories of his first love haunt him. This is a melancholy story about the ups and downs of queer life. It is sexually frank and bittersweet. Between this and Parasite, South Korea has been surprising me quite a bit in the last few years.

3. Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa

This is another charming and offbeat story. After her boyfriend announces that he is marrying someone else, Takako moves into her uncle’s bookstore in Jimbocho, a Tokyo neighborhood with over 150 bookshops. At first, she is depressed and dislocated, sleeping more of the day. Slowly, though, she comes to life while getting to know her neighbors and beginning to enjoy reading for the first time. A lot of books about reading romanticize it, but this one simply shows the calming influence it can have on someone whose life is in turmoil.

I really enjoyed all three of these books and the worlds they opened up to me.

Mid Memoirs

2023 will be remembered as a year that spawned a few notable celebrity memoirs. It started with the January release of Prince Harry’s unsparing Spare, in which he revealed that his brother physically assaulted him and that he visited a psychic to connect with the spirit of his late mother. Harry had a freedom that other celebrities do not, which is that it is unlikely that his family will sue him. In the age of the celebrity defamation lawsuit, though, memoirs are generally in an awkward position. If an author names names, they risks being sued for millions, with the court of public opinion eager to see proof of the lurid claims. Skim over details and they risk seeming coy, frustrating the reader with their lack of candor. So what’s a celeb to do?

The bombshell memoir by Britney Spears, The Woman In Me, doesn’t exactly pull punches. In fact, it describes abuse and control at the hands of her father, Jamie Spears, that is appalling. Spears’ father was an alcoholic who gained legal control over his daughter to the point that he had the ability to restrict her eating habits and reveal her sexual history to her potential suitors. Perhaps he was also the imprint that lead to her disastrous taste in men: first love Justin Timberlake insisted that she abort his child, and then responded to her physical pain over the procedure by pulling out a guitar and strumming a song for her. (He is reportedly furious over the memoir.)

The book is readable but not exceptional. It’s doubtful she wrote it herself, but the ghostwriter lacks the narrative skill that shaped recent standout memoirs like Demi Moore’s Inside Out. Ms. Spears has been treated appallingly by a misogynistic tabloid press, and the memoir is her attempt to hit back. It’s unfortunate it isn’t more biting, but given the early boffo sales, she may still have the last laugh.

A slightly better offering is Elliot Page’s Pageboy, an attempt to depict the showbiz trans experience. There are some great moments in this memoir, such as when the actor spends time on an organic farm or when he lives alone in the Nova Scotia woods, but unfortunately overall it doesn’t delve very deeply into his psyche. Instead it’s a polite tell-all in which few names are named. There is an intriguing scene, for instance, in which an A list actor verbally attacks Elliot after he comes out as gay. It’s horrifying, but the anonymity the author extends to him just underscores how the Hollywood power structure works. I enjoyed it, but it doesn’t rank in the memorable reads of the year.

Twinning

Although it is my established habit to not read authors twice, there are plenty of exceptions. When I happily lost a weekend to Daisy Jones and the Six a few years ago, I not only found my favorite read of the year but also an author worth revisiting. And in doing so I had that experience of meeting an author’s children in book form. An author’s works are often variations on a set of themes. And like a person’s children, there are tangible and ineffable similarities.

Taylor Jenkins Reid writes about show business with mildly soapy plots, appealing love stories, and strong female leads. I have clear favorites from the three I’ve read. This week I look at similarities between my favorite two.

1. Both protagonists are hugely successful in show business. Daisy Jones fronts a Fleetwood Mac style band, writing songs and touring. Evelyn Hugo is a New Yorker who hits it big on the silver screen.

2. Both are being interviewed as a framing device for the story. Evelyn has hired a rookie journalist to ghost write her memoir. Daisy Jones is being interviewed for a documentary.

3. Both are in love with someone they can’t have. Daisy falls for bandmate Billy Dunne, who moved to LA with his girlfriend Camilla. They marry before Billy realizes his feelings for Daisy. He refuses to leave his wife. Evelyn is in love with Cecilia St. James and, while they have more of a relationship than Billy and Daisy do, they are doomed by the times that won’t allow them to be public.

4. Both have twists involving the interviewers. I won’t reveal what they are, but there is a similarity.

5. Both are adaptation-happy. Some books are meant for live action and Taylor Jenkins Reid knows how to write to that audience. Daisy Jones recently launched on Netflix (It’s good!) and there is much speculation that Jessica Chastain will play Cecilia St. James in a similar streaming series. No word yet on who will play Evelyn.

The Who Two

I love the idea of reading challenges, although I haven’t done too many. I’ve got a roster for 2023 of twelve books suggested by book friends. (Haven’t read one yet, but there’s plenty of time.) I got farther with the alphabet challenge a few years ago. It is just as it sounds: read titles alphabetically A-Z. The only thing I remember about it is that I read a novella by Wendell Berry.

While searching alphabetically by title, I noticed a peculiarity in my TBR pile: I have two books with nearly identical titles. I had a chance to read them recently and here is what I discovered. Call this a light challenge: two books with similar titles.

Florence Darrow works as an editorial assistant, aspiring to see her short stories published by her employer. After a drunken faux pas, she is fired and quickly takes a mysterious job to pay her rent. She is hired to assist an author named Maud Dixon, who has gained literary fame despite complete anonymity. She travels upstate to work for her new boss.

After Maud convinces Florence to travel with her to Morocco to do research, a car accident kills the author. Florence sees an opportunity to write Maud’s book because the publishers won’t know the difference. Who exactly is Maud Dixon: the author or Florence?

I loved the setup of this novel, as well as the travel aspect. However, at a certain point the plotting becomes obvious. You would have to be an infrequent noir reader to not see where this is going.

After a beating by her mother, Vera Kelly steals her car and is arrested. A stint in a reform school leads to a job in Greenwich Village and a chance encounter with a CIA recruiter. Soon Vera is surveilling possible KGB agents in Argentina on the eve of a coup.

Told in alternating chapters featuring her youth in the 1950s and her CIA work a decade later, this is an easy read that is light on substance. Vera is incidentally bisexual, having relationships with both men and women that don’t seem to amount to much. The spy story is similarly quixotic. The protagonist and tone reminded me of something Marie Semple would craft.

The Long and The Short Of It

When it comes to reading, I have a few rules. I’ve written plenty about my “one and done” rule and the exceptions to it. For reasons of practicality I like to diversify and not read too many authors twice. The writer has to be notable for me to read them multiple times. I have broken that rule probably fifty times, but for the most part I stick to it..

I also tend to be a morning reader. The romantic image of turning a few pages before turning in has never materialized in my schedule. I’m too tired by the end of the day, and too filled with thoughts, to concentrate. So reading is typically accompanied by a morning cup of coffee.

Third rule: I finish books. DNF is a tough settlement for me and one I rarely negotiate. I have slogged through some terrible books. One novel I picked up read like Sleeping With The Enemy fanfiction. I finished a tediously pretentious memoir by Debra Winger and a short story in which a woman cooked semen. I’d like to think that I’m getting a stamp in a passport by hitting the final credits.

This year for the first time I am playing around with a new rule. Maybe it’s more a book challenge than a rule. However, after noticing an especially high number of big books on my TBR pile, I decided to do some reading by size.

The plan is simple: for every long book I finish this year, I will then read a few very short ones. This may turn 2023 into the year of long and short. We’ll see.

Last week I wrote about the very long A Little Life. At over seven hundred pages, it really should count as two reads. On the flip side, here are three very short books I have read since finishing that tome. I’d like to think the axis is balanced again.

This is a lovely short novel about two families who come together for a rehearsal dinner in a garden of the childhood home of the groom’s father. Pinder is writing a cookbook about Mesopotamian food and is considering, as the novel opens, making pigeon pie for the twenty-four expected guests. His daughter, Sara, likes to sit on roofs. His other daughter, Naomi, is just back from a job at an orphanage in Budapest. His son, Adam, is marrying a woman named Eliza the next morning. All of the characters are distinct and a bit quirky. There is cultural tension, a budding romance, and a mysterious guest. High points for botanical trivia.

This is a short essay by a Nigerian author and feminist. I enjoyed seeing the topic through her eyes. A good choice for International Women’s Day on March 8th.

The author is the product of a nineteen-year-old bisexual and a Texas preacher with another family. She is raised mainly by her grandparents, a banking heiress who is going broke and a Brit who regales his granddaughter with stories of his impoverished London boyhood. Somehow they all end up on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. The memoir is mainly about her grandparents’ childhood memories as told to their granddaughter. Her hardscrabble grandad and high society grandmother are a peculiar match but offer a grounded sense of family. This is a strange book that fits into a series of short memoirs about the author’s unusual life. In the next, The Kiss, her father appears.

A Little (More) Life

“Things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases…life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully. “

A character says this early in A Little Life, a sprawling (700+ pages), heartbreaking, frustrating, indulgent, and accomplished novel. It is a comment by the adoptive father of the protagonist, Jude, who has had a life you wouldn’t wish on anyone. Abandoned as a baby by parents he never knows, he is abused by the brothers at a monastery that take him in. After he escapes with kindly Brother Luke, he is sold into child prostitution. He escapes eventually, only to be abused again.

Fortunately, we don’t learn this immediately. As the novel opens, Jude is one of four college friends starting life in New York. He and Willem are apartment hunting in the first scene, meeting their friends JB and Malcolm for lunch at a favorite dive afterwards. From the setup, you expect this restaurant to appear again and again as their hangout. It is one of several surprises about this novel that we never see them there again.

Another is that Malcolm and JB, presented as co-leads, are only tangential to the plot. They come in and out as supporting characters, JB more centrally at the beginning and Malcolm in a shocking twist near the end. Overall, this really is Jude’s story and, to a lesser extent, Willem’s.

Willem becomes a successful actor while Jude is a litigator. Their decision to become romantic partners surprised me a bit. It’s as utilitarian a love story as I’ve ever read. It was also my first problem with the characterization: Willem is so ideal and saintly that I wasn’t sure what the author meant by him. Was he coupling with Jude out of brotherhood or romantic desire? Guilt over his young brother’s death? Or is the author depicting the platonic life partnerships that some encounter in modern life?

To be clear, Willem and Jude are not strictly platonic. However, their tortured sex life is also something you wouldn’t wish on anyone. Are we supposed to want them together or apart? The author has interesting things to say about inevitable settling.

There is a cruel final twist towards the end that lands like a plank of wood. I’m inclined to applaud the bleak courage it took the author to upend everyone. The final life rearrangement is not wonderful but brutal.