The Sentence, by Louise Erdich: The first half of this is absolute unfettered delight while simultaneously philosophical and profound. The characters – especially narrator Tookie – the descriptions, the language play, the voice – it’s hilarious. In its distinctiveness, its humor, and the sense of “here is a master at work” it was akin to James McBride’s Deacon King Kong. In the second half, COVID appears. At first I was disappointed, wanting to remain in Tookie’s individual timeline, but that was misguided. It was just as mesmerizing to be with Tookie during the pandemic and the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis.
A Place For Us, by Fatima Farheen Mirza: Overall I enjoyed this and certainly feel that the author is talented, but the pacing and register of the novel really slowed it down – there are so many descriptions that all feel of equal weight and a persistent sense of “how wondrous is it all!” that doesn’t allow anything to feel truly wondrous. I didn’t mind the shifting perspectives at all – though one family member really gets short shrift – but often the switches in time period felt arbitrary, as if they were occurring simply to keep up a pattern rather than to serve the narrative.
The Rose Code, by Kate Quinn: It seems I’ve been conflating Kate Quinn and Kate Atkinson for a while (likely because Atkinson has a novel, Transcription, that sounds right out of Quinn’s oeuvre – World War II, England, spies), but this was my first Quinn novel. It was quite immersive and I grew more invested as I read despite feeling, initially, that it was dragging a bit. It might have dug a bit deeper into the concepts of betrayal, allyship, and patriotism, but ultimately a great read, both as mystery and history.
The Illumination, by Kevin Brockmeier: Does anyone work from a conceit better than Kevin Brockmeier? In A Brief History of the Dead there’s a second world, or a limbo, inhabited by people who have died but who are still remembered by at least one living person. In The Illumination, physical and emotional pain become visible in the form of light. Six short stories (or long chapters), each with a main character, connected by a noteboIt seems I’ve been conflating ok that falls into their possession. There’s another trick hidden in one of the chapters, in which a character notes “and after that, everything happened in tens” and then every sentence for the rest of the chapter is ten words long. Small things nagged – there’s a turn of events in the second chapter that made me recoil slightly, and the fifth chapter gets hard to follow at times – but the writing is often exquisite.
The Least of Us, by Sam Quinones: Dreamland, Quinones’s 2015 book, is one of the most compelling works of journalism/narrative nonfiction I’ve ever read. His follow-up is also engrossing and enlightening, but doesn’t have the same cohesion or converging narratives that Dreamland did so well. The Least of Us is more fragmented, and it’s hard to keep track of the individuals across the different sections of the book – it might have worked better to have each person’s entire store in one contiguous space. I don’t agree with every single policy idea Quinones puts forward, but in reading I trusted that I was in the mind of someone who is deeply invested in the opioid/heroin/now fentanyl and meth crises and who has thought carefully about how to approach it. The most startling thing I learned was that there are two different processes for cooking methamphetamines, and around 2016 the P2P process – which doesn’t require pseudoephedrine and thus is easier in terms of supplies, but which creates far more toxic byproducts (even beyond the effects that meth typically has) and can cause temporary psychosis and permanent brain damage – became far more common among suppliers, and that may account for a significant amount of the increased homelessness major cities have seen in the last five years.
