Wicked Characters, Scary Stories

These two novels have in common their satire (of novelists in the first, of influencers in the second) and their devolvement from somewhat humorous irony to gruesomeness.  

The Plot     Jean Hanff Korelitz     (2021)  The character Jacob Bonner’s first novel was moderately successful, but he struggles to come up with a good plot in his subsequent attempts at writing. Then, when he’s teaching in a low-residency MFA program in Vermont, he meets a student who, despite being obnoxious, has a brilliant idea for a plot. A few years later, Bonner learns that the student has died, without ever publishing his novel. The idea seems to be available for the taking, and Bonner takes. There are multiple levels of storytelling in Hanff Korelitz’s account of the results, and she critiques the entire community of writers as she weaves these stories. I guessed the mystery component of this novel well before the ending, but what surprised me was the grisly denouement of Bonner’s theft (or borrowing or appropriating) of that plot. Although I don’t go in for grisliness, by the time I got there it was too late to put this riveting book down. There’s a sequel to The Plot, called The Sequel, which I think I’ll skip, since sociopaths are not my favorite characters.

Everyone is Lying to You     Jo Piazza     (2025)  What starts out as a novel about the phenomenal rise of female social media influencers turns dark pretty fast. Lizzie is a journalist in her thirties who hasn’t seen her college bestie, Bex, in fifteen years. Bex, who now goes by Rebecca, is a trad-wife influencer with six kids and millions of followers, posting from a ranch out West. When Bex offers Lizzie an exclusive interview, Lizzie gets drawn into a complex scenario involving the brutal murder of Bex’s husband, the disappearance of Bex and her kids, and the intrigues of other mommy-influencers. I couldn’t help but compare this novel to Caro Claire Burke’s 2026 phenomenon, Yesteryear (reviewed here), which has more pointed mockery of influencers but fewer scenes of brutality. Both Burke and Piazza position themselves as critics of the trad-wife lifestyle, the monetization of which by influencers often hides the cruelty behind the cameras.

Men Facing a Crisis: Two Novels

Alan Opts Out     Courtney Maum     (2026)  Rampant consumerism is the target of the satire in this fast-paced contemporary novel. The titular Alan is a highly successful East Coast advertising executive. Through an odd turn of events, he comes to see the emptiness of the product-based lifestyle that his family espouses, and he moves into the playhouse in the back yard of his huge house. Meanwhile, Vivian, Alan’s wife, is seeking admittance to an exclusive women’s club, going in the opposite direction from Alan. The couple’s two daughters have their own idiosyncrasies—one has the ability to speak in the languages of animals, for example. The premise here is clever, and the denouement is devastating. For another over-the-top satire of the current American scene, see my review of Yesteryear, here. 

The Things We Never Say     Elizabeth Strout     (2026)  The central character in this novel is Artie Dam, a beloved high-school history teacher in his late fifties, who ponders the ages-old question “Do humans have free will?” Although Artie is outwardly cheerful and optimistic, readers come to see his inner sadness, as he faces several challenges in his family life and in his work life. The contemporary setting of this novel doesn’t shy away from the current political climate—one reviewer has called it a “Blue State book” because of Artie’s clear voting preferences. This is not my favorite of Elizabeth Strout’s novels (for a rundown of them, click here), but any writing by Strout is better than about 80% of the books on the bestseller lists. Her character development is especially strong.

Mysteries by Spencer-Fleming

Julia Spencer-Fleming’s excellent series of mystery thrillers, featuring Clare Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne, really must be read in chronological order, starting with In the Bleak Midwinter, from 2002. Here’s an excerpt from my review of that book:

“The character Clare Fergusson served as a combat helicopter pilot in the Army but finds her true vocation as an Episcopal priest . . . Clare is in bad shape emotionally from her military service. Russ, who is also a veteran, has his own demons. The electricity between these two is crackling from their very first meeting. And did I mention that Russ is married? . . . I confess that the crimes that occur in the Clare/Russ Series are not the main attraction for me. There are violent scenes that I have to glide past, particularly when they involve fresh human blood on snow banks. I’ve read this series primarily for the interactions of Clare and Russ and for the Episcopal humor . . . The setting is depicted generously and with elegant detail, helping readers feel the biting cold winds of a blizzard, the treacherous slippage of tires on ice-slicked roads.”

The ninth and tenth offerings in the series do not disappoint. I challenge readers to put down either of these books in the last 50 pages:

Hid from Our Eyes     Julia Spencer-Fleming     (2020)  Spencer-Fleming takes each of her book titles from a well-known hymn in the Episcopal tradition, which is fitting, given Clare Fergusson’s occupation as a priest in a fictional small town in upstate New York. In Hid from Our Eyes, Rev Clare and Russ Van Alstyne, the town’s chief of police, put their considerable intelligences together to solve three murders, two of which are decades-old cold cases. Even the most astute of mystery readers is unlikely to guess the ending of this twisty one, which features Spencer-Fleming’s rapid-fire dialogue and beautifully drawn characters.

At Midnight Comes the Cry     Julia Spencer-Fleming     (2025)  This title is taken from an Advent hymn, and the story is, appropriately, set in the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas. In the busy holiday season, Clare and Russ are drawn into confrontation with a white supremacist militia that operates in the nearby Adirondack Mountains. Complicating matters is the fact that local police officer Hadley Knox is worried that her former-maybe-not-former boyfriend, Kevin Flynn, has disappeared into those mountains. State forest ranger Paul Terrance is introduced in this book, and he’s a welcome addition to the cast of characters, bringing the perspective of a Native American to the rugged landscape where the shocking story plays out.

Unconventional Contemporary Women

Whether in Nebraska or New York, you can find women who defy stereotypes.

Cherry Baby     Rainbow Rowell     (2026)  First, the title. Cherry is a plus-sized woman in her thirties who lives in Omaha. Baby is the name of a character that her husband, Tom, invented in a webcomic that went viral and is being made into a movie in Hollywood. Baby bears a remarkable resemblance to Cherry—hence, marital discord. Cherry and Tom separate, planning to divorce, and Cherry starts dating Russ, an old college crush of hers. Will she start a new life with Russ? Will she reunite with Tom? That’s the basic premise of the novel, but there’s much more. The novelist explores many aspects of body positivity, including through explicit sex scenes. The culture of Nebraska versus the culture of California is in the background, as are Cherry’s disagreements with her fundamentalist Christian family. It’s a roller-coaster ride, engaging and witty. (For my review of Rowell’s 2011 novel, Attachments, click here and scroll down.)

Go Gentle     Maria Semple     (2026)  Adora Hazzard is a fiftyish philosopher who specializes in ancient Greek Stoicism, and like a good Stoic, she tries to control her emotional reaction to the uncontrollable events around her. But she is nonetheless a pretty wild woman, getting herself involved in an unexpected romance and in an international art heist. Readers dash around New York City with the manic Adora in novelist Semple’s trademark fashion (exemplified in the 2016 Today Will Be Different, reviewed here). Semple excels in probing parent-child relationships, women’s midlife angst, and the pretentiousness of the ultra-wealthy. The hilarious one-liners in the dialogue come fast and furious in Go Gentle’s first-person narration, which makes sense when we learn, in a lengthy flashback, that Adora was once a Hollywood comedy writer. The title of this novel is a reference to Dylan Thomas’s poem that advises against passive acquiescence to mortality, and Adora certainly doesn’t acquiesce.

Lightweight Reads

Nothing wrong with fiction that is minimally challenging! These two novels don’t rise to the level of Great Literature, but they’re entertaining.

A Forty Year Kiss     Nickolas Butler     (2025)  In Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, we first meet Charlie sitting on a barstool, waiting nervously for the arrival of Vivian, his ex-wife, whom he has not seen for forty years. Charlie is an alcoholic—not one who gets dead drunk but one who can’t stay away from liquor. At age 64, he has retired and is renovating a farm in Wisconsin that he’s inherited. He tells Vivian that he’s changed the wild ways of his youth and wants to reunite. Vivian, meanwhile, has been leading a hardscrabble life, taking care of her grandkids for her daughter, who is a single mother. Vivian is somewhat skeptical of Charlie, and their on-again-off-again re-romancing forms the basis of the novel. It’s a fairly slender thread on which to hang a plot, but Butler makes it work, with Charlie and Vivian both gradually unveiling their secrets. Oh, and the book starts and ends with a kiss. Aside from being set in the Midwest, this novel is quite unlike Butler’s two previous novels that I’ve reviewed, The Hearts of Men and Little Faith.

Hedge     Jane Delury     (2023)  In 2012, middle-aged Maud takes a short-term job researching and restoring the gardens on a large estate in the Hudson Valley in New York. She was already seriously considering divorcing her husband (who has remained at their home in California), when she meets a co-worker, archeologist Gabriel. Sparks fly. Maud’s two daughters finish the school year and join her in New York, causing sparks of a different kind to fly. The novelist chronicles Maud’s family life over the next three years, with unexpected health challenges and the waxing and waning of relationships. I checked this book out of my local library because Maud is a garden historian—a person trained to reconstruct landscapes from the past. There are some fun gardening components of this novel, but the main themes are (1) people are imperfect and (2) life is messy.  See also my review of The Balcony, Delury’s 2018 book of linked stories, here.

Journeys

The novels reviewed below both involve a journey, one of the great tropes of literature for thousands of years, whether you call it a pilgrimage or a voyage or an expedition or a flight or a road trip.

I Cheerfully Refuse     Leif Enger     (2024)  In a dystopian near-future version of far northern Minnesota, Rainy and his wife, Lark, try to escape the notice of an autocratic American government by being far off the beaten track. Although society has basically collapsed, Lark does own a second-hand bookstore, and the written word is a threat to autocracies. After a series of tragedies, Rainy sets off, with his bass guitar, in a rickety sailboat, across the turbulent and unpredictable Lake Superior. He endures many hardships and is often thrown off course by the damaged people he meets at numerous ports of call. This is a scary book, prescient in that it was written before the second Trump presidency. I heard echoes of The Odyssey, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Don Quixote. Dystopia is not my jam, but I kept reading because of Leif Enger’s stylistic excellence. Enger’s novels are all set at least partially in Minnesota, his home state, and all are written in first-person narration, which conveys truthfulness and immediacy. See my reviews of two of his previous novels, Virgil Wander and Peace Like a River. And for another Lake Superior tale, by Peter Geye, click here.

The Rest of Our Lives     Ben Markovits    (2025)  Years ago, Tom Layward vowed that he would leave his wife, Amy, when their younger child turned eighteen. (He couldn’t forgive Amy for an affair that she had.) When he drops off their daughter at her freshman dorm in Pittsburgh, he decides to drive west rather than return to his home in New York. He stops in South Bend to visit his brother, in Denver to see a friend who’s having legal problems, and in Las Vegas to look up a girlfriend from his college days. He finally runs out of road in Los Angeles, where his son is in graduate school. Along the way, Tom reflects on his marriage and on his legal career, both of which are in serious trouble. I thought that this story, told in first person, might be getting too meandering, but then the last 29 pages of the novel pull together hints from the previous 200 pages and wallop the reader. Markovits asks us all to consider, What about the rest of your life?

20th-Century Families

Fiction set in the twentieth century may seem too close to the present day to qualify as “historical,” so perhaps it’s better to categorize these novels as “family sagas.” Following characters for decades allows an author to demonstrate their reactions to many life challenges.

Buckeye     Patrick Ryan     (2025)  Sweeping across many decades of the twentieth century, this engaging novel recounts the lives of two couples—Cal and Becky Jenkins and Felix and Margaret Salt—who become linked by a fateful encounter at the end of World War II. The novelist moves the action along briskly while still lingering on everyday details that flesh out the scenes. The setting is a fictional town in northwest Ohio, an area where I was born and where I still have many relatives, and it rings true. One theme that pervades the narrative is the lasting trauma of war:  the mustard gas that a World War I veteran remembers, the loneliness and grief of wives whose husbands are fighting in World War II, the senseless slaughter of the Vietnam War. One national reviewer of Buckeye called it “old fashioned.” Yup. I loved it.

Bug Hollow     Michelle Huneven     (2025)  In 272 pages, this fast-paced story takes readers through forty-plus years in the lives of the Samuelson family. (And that page count includes a rather odd excursion into the life of “an old family friend,” Mrs Wright.) The sudden accidental death of one of the Samuelsons affects the members of the family in different ways—alcoholism, an extramarital affair, an unexpected adoption. Author Huneven develops her characters deftly, showing how they remain resilient despite the inevitable unhappinesses of their lives. A bonus is the portrayal of the culture of southern California through the decades.

Author Spotlight: Lily King

The American author Lily King writes about human emotions with great sensitivity. Here are brief reviews of four of her books—three novels and a collection of short stories—that I recommend.

Heart the Lover      Lily King     (2025)  In Part I of this novel, a young woman, a senior at an unnamed university somewhere in the eastern United States, befriends two brilliant male students, Sam and Yash, who nickname her “Jordan.” Her intellectual life is ignited—and her ambition to become a writer is fueled—by her many conversations with these two. Jordan’s romantic entanglement with Sam and Yash in turn is another matter. Parts II and III of the novel skip many years into the woman’s future, where the consequences of her decisions back in college are played out in very sad scenes. On the last page of the novel, there is one surprising line that links this story to King’s novel Writers and Lovers.  (I didn’t understand the title until the section of the novel that describes a card game that one of the characters invents: “Heart the Lover” is the king of hearts card. You can download instructions for this game at the author’s website.)

Writers and Lovers    Lily King     (2020)  Casey, a 31-year-old server at a restaurant in Harvard Square, is a woman with authorial ambitions. She lives frugally and spends every spare moment writing a novel. She also meets some pretty wacky boyfriends. As a former server myself, I loved the restaurant scenes.

Five Tuesdays in Winter     Lily King     (2021)  I usually prefer the expansiveness of the novel format, but each of these ten stories creates a believable universe of characters and life experiences. Settings range from New England to the North Sea, from the 1960s to the present.

The English Teacher     Lily King     (2005)  In 1979, Vida Avery is an extraordinarily talented member of the staff of a private school in New England and the single mother of 15-year-old Peter. She is also very troubled woman. As the novel opens, Vida is marrying Tom Belou, a widower with three children of his own. In a spare 242 pages, the novelist probes deeply into the dynamics of life in a blended family, but those adjustments pale beside the exploration of Vida’s deteriorating mental health. Do read this one, and prepare yourself for an unexpected denouement.   

Starring Lake Superior

November 2025 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the sinking of a very famous freighter in Lake Superior, which is the largest and most northerly of the Great Lakes. Recent nonfiction books about the tragedy include Wrecked: The Edmund Fitzgerald and the Sinking of the American Economy by Thomas M. Nelson and Jerald Podair, and John U Bacon’s bestselling The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald. I’ve read excerpts from both these titles, and I recommend them to readers who want all the human-interest details and all the speculation about how the sinking could have been averted. Of course, with this anniversary, there’s also been a revival of Gordon Lightfoot’s classic 1976 folk-rock ballad “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which can be heard here.

I offer below a review of a historical novel set on Lake Superior long before the Edmund Fitzgerald went down, with all her crew, on November 10, 1975.

A Lesser Light     Peter Geye     (2025)  I’ve driven and walked for many miles along the shores of Lake Superior, which is more like an inland sea than a lake, with brooding waters and ferocious waves. Lake Superior is this novel’s central character, dictating life and death. The year is 1910, and Theobald Sauer arrives on the south shore of the lake, east of Duluth, Minnesota, to take the post of master lighthouse keeper at a new lighthouse. With him is his bride, Willa, forced into the marriage by financial circumstances and totally unsuited to be Theo’s spouse. Although both Theo and Willa are highly educated, Theo trades in conspiracy theories and religiosity, while Willa looks to science for guidance. Rounding out the cast of characters living near the remote lighthouse are a girl who has “second sight,” her fisherman uncle, the assistant lighthouse keepers and their wives—and wolves. Lots of wolves. The narrative moves very, very slowly, so I’ll admit right here that I skimmed some of the chapters between pages 300 and 400. Still, the novelist’s prose is radiant and his characters, especially that lake, are convincing.  

Author Spotlight: Amor Towles

In 2011, Amor Towles debuted as a novelist with Rules of Civility, set in 1930s Manhattan, where a love triangle plays out against a backdrop of jazz clubs and boarding houses, with considerable alcohol. Towles’s impeccable character development is already on display here, and his examination of the power of wealthy New Yorkers is even more meaningful today. Take note of the character Evelyn (Eve) Ross, whose life story will be continued in subsequent fiction by Towles, reviewed below.

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In 2016, Towles had phenomenal success with his next historical novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, which in 2024 was made into a television mini-series, now on streaming services. Here’s an abridged recap of my 2017 review of this blockbuster work of fiction:

Amor Towles’s fictional foray into Moscow’s elegant Metropol Hotel in the years from 1922 to 1954, A Gentleman in Moscow, is captivating on many levels. Towles posits that high-level Communist Party officials still wined and dined themselves and foreign dignitaries, right through the Depression of the 1930s, and that ordinary Soviet citizens found small bits of happiness despite privations and surveillance. Some people displayed great courage in adversity. Towles’s portrait of the fictional Count Alexander Rostov gives us a glimpse into what might have happened to one of the ousted aristocrats in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The story:  In 1922, the erudite and cultured young Count Rostov is sentenced to permanent house arrest in the Metropol Hotel, just off Red Square in Moscow. This is not exile to Siberia, but if Rostov walks out the door of the hotel, he will be shot. The Count, relegated to a tiny attic room, approaches his predicament with the utmost composure. Since his own family members are all dead, he gradually fashions himself a family from the employees and guests of the Metropol. While chaos and war unfold outside the Metropol, all is grace and style inside. Count Rostov is, to me, a Russian version of Lord Peter Wimsey, from the 1930s British mystery novels of Dorothy L. Sayers. Yes, he can be snobbish at times, but he’s generous, principled, and unwaveringly loyal to his friends.

As the years of Rostov’s life tick by, Towles tosses off details about the Metropol in one witty scene after another. Pay close attention to the most minuscule of these details, which Towles is constructing carefully as he builds toward the denouement of his novel. You can easily get pulled into enjoyment of individual episodes, as friends arrive to visit Rostov, a famous actress becomes his lover, and a young girl takes him behind the scenes to secret places in the enormous hotel. Rostov comes to know every cranny of the hotel intimately, and this knowledge will serve him well as the plot whirls to a conclusion in the final hundred pages of this 462-page book.

“Sophisticated” does not begin to do justice to Towles’s writing style. Here he is describing a clock: “Suddenly, that long-strided watchman of the minutes caught up with his bowlegged brother at the top of the dial. As the two embraced, the spring’s within the clock’s casing loosened, the wheels spun, and the miniature hammer fell, setting off the first of those dulcet tones that signaled the arrival of noon.” (32)

I guessed some but not all of the elements of the caper that caps the plot of A Gentleman in Moscow. The surprises were highly enjoyable.

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Fans of A Gentleman in Moscow will find much of the same verve and strong character development in Towles’s 2021 offering, The Lincoln Highway. Two teenage brothers set out on the roads and rails of the United States in 1954, searching for the mother who abandoned them, and they have many adventures on their forced detours. I found this novel less satisfying than A Gentleman in Moscow, primarily because of the meandering plot segments (admittedly common in such picaresque tales) and the somewhat weak ending. But The Lincoln Highway is still entertaining.  

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The most recent publication by Towles is Table for Two, in which he has gathered six of his short stories, plus a 200-page novella. The short stories are delightful vignettes, playing on happenstance and on human greed, set variously in contemporary New York City and in the waning days of czarist Russia. The novella included in this volume, Eve in Hollywood, is a smoky noir that stars Evelyn Ross, one of Towles’s spunky, brilliant characters. Evelyn/Eve was a third of the love triangle in Towles’s Rules of Civility, reviewed above, and the novella picks up her life where that novel left off. Her complex story builds to a shocking conclusion, at which readers may exclaim, “So that’s how it all fits together!” Towles writes classy, clever lines and holds total mastery over his plot.

21st-Century Family Life in Fiction

How the Light Gets In     Joyce Maynard     (2024)  This novel is a sequel to Maynard’s 2021 Count the Ways, and it helps to know the basics of that plot. In Count the Ways, the many sad and shocking events that punctuate Eleanor’s life are traced from her childhood, in the 1950s and 1960s, into the 2000s. Eleanor balances her career as an artist and children’s book author with her role as wife to her woodworker husband, Cam, and as mother to their three children. In How the Light Gets In, Maynard follows Eleanor from her late 50s into her 70s, with many flashbacks to events of previous decades. Family interactions are always complicated, and the three generations of Eleanor’s family have more than their fair share of struggle and misfortune, including estrangement between parent and child, terminal illness, career failure (and success), disability, gender dysphoria, and a long-distance affair. All this takes place against the backdrop of the tumultuous American political scene of the years 2009 to 2024. I found some of the subplots, especially that long-distance affair, farfetched, but I loved the characters so much that I gave the novelist a pass. If you delight in reading about the everyday lives of people doing their best within their imperfect families, Maynard’s work will please you. Incidentally, the light gets in through the cracks.

Truly Madly Guilty     Liane Moriarty     (2016)  I could not get my head around Moriarty’s 2014 bestseller, Big Little Lies, but I thought I’d try this subsequent novel of hers. In Truly Madly Guilty, Moriarty takes us inside three upper-middle-class marriages and inside the heads of the six adults at a friendly backyard barbecue that goes horribly awry. (The setting is Sydney, Australia, where the inhabitants are really partial to barbecues, but it could be any industrialized country.) For more than 200 pages, I read with infuriating impatience, as the “incident” at this barbecue is revealed ever so slowly in brief flashbacks. But after the reveal, the tale is livelier. All the characters have to come to grips with their feelings of guilt and with the way that this guilt affects their personal relationships. The dialogue is realistic, as are the well-drawn characters. I especially loved Oliver, the sensible, nerdy accountant, and Dakota, the bright, bookish ten-year-old daughter of one of the couples. Maybe the wrap-up of the plot is a little too pat, but it worked for me.

 Show Don’t Tell     Curtis Sittenfeld     (2025)  I’ve read and reviewed most of Sittenfeld’s work (click here), and I’ve rarely been disappointed. She portrays 21st-century life candidly, especially in the way that she uncovers the emotions of women—as wives, mothers, sisters, friends, lovers, students, businesspeople, professionals, artists. In this latest collection of short stories, Sittenfeld does not veer away from her raucous, funny approach to fiction, so expect explicit sex and cringey toilet scenes. But don’t expect tidy endings. Many of the stories present the characters at decision points in their lives, and the reader doesn’t always find out what the decision is. I noted also the author’s fascination with the way in which wealthy and famous Americans handle their wealth and fame, including thinly disguised portraits of living billionaires.

Author Spotlight: Weike Wang

Back in 2018—when I reviewed Weike Wang’s first novel, Chemistry, on this blog—I predicted “Weike Wang is an author to watch.” Indeed, Wang has since produced two more well-received novels focusing on the experiences of Chinese American women. In this post, I offer recaps of my reviews of Chemistry and of Wang’s second novel, Joan Is Okay, plus a brand new review of her third book, Rental House. In all her novels, Wang makes her readers think hard about the role of immigrants in American society, about the difficulties that women (of any race) face in choosing careers, and about the tensions between the personal and the professional in the lives of talented people.

Chemistry     Weike Wang     (2017)  The unnamed first-person narrator in Chemistry is a young woman heading into her final year of a doctoral program in chemistry at a prestigious university. She’s Chinese American, brought to the United States as a young child. Boyfriend Eric is a white guy who is just embarking on what will undoubtedly be a rewarding academic career. He wants to marry the narrator, but she demurs, worried about forfeiting her intellectual capacity. Added to this tension is a side plot about the narrator’s best friend, a physician in New York, who talks to the narrator frequently on the phone. Should the narrator marry Eric, a man very well suited to her personality and intelligence, even though he can never fully understand her family’s culture and language? If she doesn’t pursue chemistry, what should she do with her life? And if she moves to the Midwest to follow Eric, should she take her comical, untrainable dog with her? Chemistry doesn’t give readers all the answers, but that’s its charm.

Joan is Okay     Weike Wang     (2022)  All of us know what’s going to happen in the intensive care units of hospitals in New York City in the spring of 2020. We know that ICU physicians like Joan are going to be in the thick of the COVID pandemic. But in 2019, Joan can’t predict this. She’s dealing instead with the expectations of her boss (who rewards her workaholism) as well as the expectations of her Chinese American family (who want her to get married and have kids). She also has a strangely intrusive neighbor and an oddball work colleague. Still, Joan is okay, even when COVID hits. This short novel packs a punch.

Rental House     Weike Wang     (2024)  Keru and Nate met at Yale, married several years later, and settled in New York City. One summer, when the two are in their mid-thirties and doing well in their careers, they decide to rent a house on Cape Cod, inviting their parents to spend separate weeks with them and their large sheepdog. In-law relationships can be fraught, especially so when one set of parents (Keru’s) is Chinese American and one (Nate’s) is Appalachian American. Needless to say, the vacation is not smooth sailing. In the second section of Rental House, we skip ahead five years, as Keru and Nate hit age 40 and rent a vacation house in the Catskills. The same cultural clashes take place, and new marital challenges arise. Wang’s prose style is spare and droll, her dialogues are sharp, and her psychological insights are penetrating.

Author Spotlight: Elizabeth Strout

Long-time followers of this blog will have read several reviews of the fiction of Elizabeth Strout over the past eight years. In this post, I offer an overview of all of her books, focusing on the two main strands: books about the character Olive Kitteridge and books about the character Lucy Barton. I include a new review of Strout’s 2024 novel, Tell Me Everything, in which these two strands are braided together.

In my opinion, you can read anything by Elizabeth Strout and you won’t be disappointed. But for maximum enjoyment of the character development, read in the order of publication.

THE OLIVE KITTERIDGE BOOKS

Olive Kitteridge  (2008)  In a Pulitzer-winning collection of linked short stories, Strout introduced an indomitable retired schoolteacher from the fictional rural town of Crosby, Maine. This book was turned into a four-part HBO miniseries in 2014.

Olive, Again  (2019)  The sequel to Olive Kitteridge comes in the form of thirteen more stories that unpeel life in small-town New England. The cranky, candid Olive, who weaves in and out of the tales, is sometimes intolerant but often kind. When her kindness is awkwardly expressed and causes offense, she’s surprised, and she tries to rectify her behavior. The other characters in Olive, Again are townspeople whom Olive interacts with in some way. Their lives are intertwined with each other and with the inevitable sadnesses and transgressions and occasional triumphs of living on this Earth. The surroundings of the town can reflect the despair of the inhabitants, yet it’s not all bleakness. Strout's characters can also connect with the natural world in a way that lifts their spirits, if only briefly.

Three other novels by Strout have characters connected to Olive Kitteridge or rural Maine:  Amy and Isabelle (1998), Abide with Me (2006), and The Burgess Boys (2013).

THE LUCY BARTON BOOKS

My Name is Lucy Barton  (2016)  The titular Lucy is a writer in New York City in the 1980s, with a husband and two young daughters. When Lucy is hospitalized for many weeks with a mysterious illness, her estranged mother travels from Illinois to her bedside. The two women reach an uneasy peace with each other, especially as they tell stories about the folks back home, in the (fictional) Amgash, the depressed rural town where Lucy grew up in extreme poverty.

Anything Is Possible  (2017)  In these linked short stories, the character Lucy Barton has become an acclaimed writer. Chicago is one of the stops on Lucy’s book-promotion tour, so she visits her home town of Amgash, Illinois, to see her siblings. We get much more detail about the childhood suffering of the Barton kids—details that were glossed over and somewhat sanitized in My Name is Lucy Barton. Strout toys with the vagaries of memory in both books, and the power of money emerges as another theme. Lucy has lived the up-by-her-bootstraps version of the American dream—getting into college and building a successful career. Others in her small town remain impoverished, with their share of miseries, including sexual abuse and mental illness. The prose is this book is spare, with every word well chosen. The emotions are raw but presented with subtle empathy.

Oh William! (2021) is another book in the Lucy Barton series, about Lucy’s first husband, whom she reconnects with after the death of her second husband.

Lucy by the Sea  (2022)  In this novel, it’s now early March 2020, and Lucy’s ex-husband, William, insists that they leave New York City for a rental house on the coast of Maine. (He’s a scientist who recognizes how dangerous the coronavirus is.) This town in Maine happens to be Crosby, where the character Olive Kitteridge, from Strout’s other books, lives. In first-person narrative, Lucy details the interactions she has with some of the residents of Crosby during 2020 and early 2021. Strout excels in examining the complexities of the human condition, and Lucy by the Sea is the first discussion of the pandemic I’ve read that truly captures the sense of desperation and loneliness that the pandemic wrought.

OLIVE FINALLY MEETS LUCY!

Tell Me Everything  (2024)  We’re back in Crosby, Maine, in 2022-2023, and Strout’s two strong female characters, Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton, come face to face at last. Olive, now in an assisted living facility, regales Lucy with odd tales from her long life. Meanwhile, attorney Bob Burgess (from Strout’s 2013 novel The Burgess Boys) agrees to represent a local man who is suspected of murdering his mother. This murder mystery threads through the book and involves even more characters from Strout’s previous fiction. Some national reviewers of Tell Me Everything have complained that it’s rambling and unfocused. I disagree. I took it as a genre-cross between a novel and a collection of short stories and found it so riveting that I read it in one long afternoon. The clear theme is enunciated on page 292: “’What is the point of anyone’s life?’” Strout challenges her readers to think hard on this question.

Novels Set in 21st-Century America

All three of these novels have to do with money, which seems to be a central theme of our current century.

The Mighty Red     Louise Erdrich     (2024)  The surface story of The Mighty Red centers on Kismet Poe, a Native American teenager living near the Red River in North Dakota (where the novelist herself grew up). Two very different young men, Gary Geist and Hugo Dumach, are in romantic pursuit of Kismet; her mother, Crystal Frechette, tries to advise her. A side mystery arises when Kismet’s father, Martin, disappears, along with all trace of more than a million dollars in funds that have been raised for a church renovation. Meanwhile, dark secrets about Gary and the Red River swirl around, not revealed until late in the tale. The river actually underpins the entire narrative here. For generations, its springtime floods have deposited rich soil for farmers’ crops, but chemical overuse has poisoned much of the land. The profits of agribusiness are a powerful draw in the economic recession of 2008, when the main action of this sly and sparkling novel takes place. I want to confess that this is the first of Erdrich’s novels that I’ve read, although I have read her poems. The author herself gave me an autographed copy of her poetry collection Baptism of Desire when I had dinner with her in 1994. Louise Erdrich is the only literary rock star that I’ve ever met, and I can report that she is gracious as well as brilliant.

Entitlement     Rumann Alam     (2024)  Money, money, money! Billionaire Asher Jeffries (age 83) has plenty, and he wants to give it away through his New York foundation. One of his foundation employees, Brooke Orr (age 33), becomes his protégé and confidante. At first, Brooke is committed to the task of finding worthy recipients for Jeffries’ money, but gradually she comes to feel entitled to more and more of that money for herself. The tension builds as readers watch Brooke’s greed grow. The author’s shifting narrative voices are sometimes too abrupt for my reading style, but his character development and his depiction of Manhattan in 2014 ring true. Most of all, he fearlessly lays bare the corrupting power of money, while not shying away from issues of race and gender.

The Wedding People     Alison Espach     (2024)  For years, Phoebe has endured painful fertility treatments that have been unsuccessful. Her husband has deserted her for another woman and then divorced her. Her work as an adjunct academic is unfulfilling and unrewarded. So she travels to an expensive hotel in Newport, Rhode Island, determined to take pills and end it all. But she stumbles into a week-long wedding celebration that was supposed to have exclusive reservations for the entire hotel, and the bride is not happy to have an interloper. Phoebe gets drawn into the wedding drama—one character calls it “the goddamned most elaborate wedding possible.” If, like me, you are baffled by the current American obsession with over-the-top weddings, you’ll find the satire here quite satisfying. The writing, heavy on dialog to carry the plot, is sharp and witty. But, in the end, the novel is less about weddings and more about surviving depression and finding your true self. 

A Grab Bag of Recent Novels

Leaving     Roxana Robinson     (2024)  A man and a woman meet by chance at a performance of the opera Tosca in New York City. Sarah, retired and long divorced, volunteers in the art world. Warren, a practicing architect, is unhappily married. They were romantically involved nearly forty years before, when they were both in college, but have not seen each other since then. Flashes of remembrances and of possibilities ensue. Why did they break up? Were they really soulmates who should have been together all those years? Is there such a thing as “soulmates”? The personal and family complications that arise from their renewed liaison are presented in sensitive and devastating detail.

The Five-Star Weekend     Elin Hilderbrand     (2023)  Escape to the island of Nantucket, off the coast of Cape Cod, for another of Hilderbrand’s beach-based, gossipy escapades. This time, the recently widowed fifty-something Hollis Shaw gathers four friends (one from each phase of her life) for a weekend of companionship and gourmet dining, to help her move through her grief. All the friends have their own back stories and secrets, and their lives have intersected with Hollis’s life in surprising ways. I was inundated by the many references to designer clothes, pop music, fine wines, and Nantucket restaurants, but I still buzzed happily through this lightweight novel. I’ve reviewed a number of other Hilderbrand offerings, including 28 Summers, Summer of ’69, and Endless Summer.

Mercury     Amy Jo Burch     (2023)  Next, step into the rural western Pennsylvania town of Mercury in the 1990s and meet the Joseph family:

• Mick (patriarch, expert roofer, weirdo)

• Elise (matriarch, frustrated housewife)

• Sons Bay, Way, and Shay (I’m not making this up)

• Marley (who arrives in town as a teenager and becomes enmeshed in the lives of the Josephs)

The introspective musings of these characters can go on at length, but the family dynamics are fascinating, within a plot that takes many unexpected turns. There’s a subplot with Marley’s friend Jade, a dead body that causes lots of consternation, and a harrowing denouement. Questions that the novelist seems to be asking: Which family secrets do you keep and which do you reveal? What do you sacrifice as an individual to be part of a family? Where does love come in?

Author Spotlight: Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott has won so many literary prizes that the list would take up this entire post, so I’ll just mention that her novel Charming Billy won the National Book Award for fiction in 1998. Her novels have often been on the New York Times bestseller list, and her short fiction has been featured in such publications as the New Yorker.

McDermott can conjure up New York City in the early-to-mid twentieth century better than any other author I know, and within this area of historical fiction she specializes in creating characters who are Roman Catholic. She isn’t trying to convert her readers to Catholicism but rather to tease out complex ethical questions. How does an ordinary person pursue virtue and decency? How does a adopting a religious framework for one’s life affect this pursuit, for good or for ill? McDermott will make you think hard about questions of morality.

Here are two examples of McDermott’s work set in New York City:

Someone     Alice McDermott     (2013)  In this novel, McDermott gives us an intimate portrait of an Irish Catholic woman’s conventional life, from youth to old age. The beauty here lies in the simplicity and the lovely language.

The Ninth Hour     Alice McDermott     (2017)  This book appears as a favorite of mine in several categories. With wonderfully resonant prose, McDermott presents the pros and cons of being Catholic in early twentieth-century Brooklyn. The neighborhood nuns are often heroines. Click here for my full review.

McDermott’s latest novel departs from her usual locale, with great success.

Absolution     Alice McDermott     (2023)  At the start of the war in Vietnam, the United States sent “advisors”—some of them civilian engineers and some of them military personnel—to southeast Asia. Those in the higher ranks of advisors brought their families with them to Saigon. (Even though I remember the Vietnam era vividly, this possibility had never occurred to me.) Absolution is a fictional story about those wives and children in Saigon in 1963. Tricia/Patsy is a naive young bride who is befriended by Charlene, a mother in her thirties. Charlene is a manipulative woman who dabbles in the black market, among other unsavory pursuits, and she pulls Tricia into her circle. Their story is narrated, looking back from the present day, first by a very elderly Tricia and then by Charlene’s daughter, Rainey. The racism and sexism of the period are presented in unvarnished and realistic detail, as the women muddle along on the edges of a momentous period in the history of both the United States and Southeast Asia. Alice McDermott is at the top of her game, so don’t miss Absolution.  

Mysteries That Are More Than Mysteries

As frequent readers of this blog know, I’m a fan of mystery novels. I shy away from dark thrillers, but a knotty plot with well-constructed red herrings will keep me up until 2 am. And I’ve read a number of multi-book mystery series in their entirety. Click here and here and here to see some of my past series reviews.

In this blog post, I offer new reviews of two recent mysteries, one set in 2020 and one set in 1958, that elevate the genre well beyond the solving of a puzzle.

Happiness Falls     Angie Kim     (2023)  At its most basic, this novel is a cracking good mystery, about the disappearance of Adam Parson, a middle-aged husband and father, at a park near Washington, DC. But Happiness Falls is much more than that, because the only witness to the disappearance of Adam is his teenage son Eugene, who has a genetic disability that impedes his motor control and renders him unable to speak. To complicate matters more, the action takes place in June of 2020, during COVID lockdown. Oh, and then there’s the fact that Adam’s family is biracial. Eugene’s college-age sister, Mia, narrates the story in first person, asking readers to consider how society treats disabled people and immigrants, and reflecting on happiness—its perception and its achievement. This novel was deservedly on many lists of the best of 2023.

The River We Remember     William Kent Krueger     (2023)  “In a town where the hatred from wars long past and wars more recent still had hooks set in so many hearts, was anyone safe?” (341) This sentence from Krueger’s latest mystery novel points to the broader themes underlying his text: the untreated trauma inflicted on millions of soldiers by combat, the racism endured by Japanese Americans after World War II, and the racism endured by Native Americans ever since colonizers arrived in North America. And yet, this novel is still a solid mystery, with many twists and turns. It’s set in the fictional small town of Jewel, in southern Minnesota, in 1958, and starts with the discovery of the body of Jimmy Quinn in the Alabaster River. The dead man had numerous enemies, so the job of the sheriff, Brody Dern, is complicated. The novelist takes us deep into the lives of many of the inhabitants of the town, deftly building character through dialog. A warning for the squeamish, among whom I count myself: the concluding chapters have some gory scenes.

Author Spotlight: Richard Russo

I’m always assured of a good read when Richard Russo’s name is on the cover. Russo has the capacity to explore the internal musings of his blue-collar characters while advancing a complicated plot, so he gets me totally invested in his characters’ happiness. Of course, not everyone in our world ends up happy.

• The Fool Trilogy

Back in 1993, Russo published Nobody’s Fool, which turned out to be the first in a series of novels all set in the decaying upstate New York town of New Bath. It helps if you read the three novels in order, but you can pick up the story anywhere along the line.

In Nobody’s Fool, set in 1984, Russo introduced Donald Sullivan, called “Sully.” At age 60, Sully has survived a number of setbacks in his rather dissolute life, but he’s buoyed by his wacky friends. (The movie adaptation of this novel starred a cantankerous Paul Newman.)

Everybody’s Fool, which came out in 2016, is set a decade after Nobody’s Fool. Russo enlarges the cast of characters and presents a flurry of incidents—sometimes hilarious and sometimes pitiable—over a two-day period.

The recently published Somebody’s Fool (2023) is the third installment. Russo moves far ahead in time, to the 2010s. Sully is dead, but his son Peter, now middle-aged, is one of the main characters. Many other folks from the previous two novels are also still around. New Bath has been annexed by the nearby Schuyler Springs, creating multiple plot threads. And, over one weekend in February, a decomposing body is found in an abandoned hotel, an estranged son returns to town, police brutality incidents are revealed, and the romantic entanglements of several couples are altered. There’s never a dull moment!

Prominent among the life lessons embedded in Somebody’s Fool is this one: when life gets tough, you have to try something. If that doesn’t work, you have to try something else. And the overall narrative theme of the novel? “How complex and multilayered even the simplest of lives [are], how they [intersect] in strange, unpredictable ways, people magically appearing at just the right moment, others turning up at the exact wrong one, often giving the impression that fate must be at work, though in all probability it was little more than chance.” (345). I loved Russo’s unconventional characters so much that I did not want this lengthy novel to end.

• The Pulitzer Winner

Russo won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for Empire Falls, which broke my heart two decades ago. The novel centers on Miles Roby, manager of the Empire Diner, and the other inhabitants of a dying town in Maine. Empire Falls is a must-read in the Russo canon, and there’s a star-studded television mini-series (2005) based on it.

• Other Russo Offerings

I’ve reviewed a number of Richard Russo’s other writings, both fiction and nonfiction, on this blog in the past. Check out my comments on Elsewhere, That Old Cape Magic, and The Destiny Thief, and my lengthier review of Chances Are . . .

For fans of the contemporary American novel, Richard Russo is essential.

Settings: Traverse City, St Louis, Chicago

Tom Lake     Ann Patchett     (2023)  In 2020, at the start of the pandemic, three young adult daughters of a family are hunkered down at their childhood home, a cherry and apple farm in Michigan, helping harvest the crops. They beg their mother to tell the full story of her summer romance with movie star Peter Duke, which took place back in 1988 when Duke was a struggling young actor. The mother obliges, and the novel toggles between 1988 and 2020. Much of the plot centers on stage productions of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, so if you haven’t read or seen the play in a while, it will help if you brush up before starting Tom Lake. That said, the unfolding of the mother’s tale and its connection to the family’s status more than 30 years later are engrossing, with small and large revelations along the way. Novelist Patchett could ask for compensation from the Michigan Travel Commission, given her glowing descriptions of the state’s natural beauty, especially the area around Traverse City, in the northwest quadrant of the Lower Peninsula. (See my review of another Patchett novel here.)

The Altruists     Andrew Ridker     (2019)  An untenured visiting/adjunct professor at a fictitious university in St Louis asks his two adult children to come home from NYC for a weekend. It’s not because he misses them—he’s facing unemployment and needs to have funds from them to bail out the mortgage on the family home. This intimate family drama looks back on pivotal scenes from the 1970s to the recent past, exploring issues of grief, parenting, and, yes, altruism. What do we want to make of our lives? How do we look back from our later years on our choices? How do our finances enter in? Arthur Alter and his children Ethan and Maggie try to answer all these questions as they grope for closure after the death of the matriarch of the family, Francine. Quibbles: I do wish that the novelist’s editor had axed some of his many flawed uses of the word “begrudging.” And the depiction of Maggie’s self-sacrificing lifestyle is somewhat mocking. Overall, though, this is a well-crafted, thought-provoking study of family dynamics.  

Wellness     Nathan Hill     (2023)  I noted in my review of Nathan Hill’s previous novel, The Nix, that Hill is exceedingly verbose. He hasn’t trimmed it down any in Wellness, but I still read all 597 pages, even his 45-page treatise (gasp) on the algorithms of Facebook. The novel’s main characters, Jack and Elizabeth, are very endearing people, whom we first meet when they are in college in Chicago in the early 1990s. I kept reading to find out how they fared over the years, in their relationship and in their city. Some chapters travel back to their childhoods, but the focus of the novel is in the early 2010s, when Jack and Elizabeth are approaching middle age and dealing with finances, parenting, and careers. (He’s an adjunct art professor, and she’s a researcher in psychology.) In some ways, Wellness is a profoundly sad book, but the novelist probes deeply into his characters’ psyches, and those characters prove resilient even in the face of tragedy.