I was disappointed by The Double Bind, by Chris Bohjalian. I have been awed by the strength of several of his past novels — Midwives, of course, but also Trans-Sister Radio and Buffalo Soldier — but I don’t find the quality of the stories to be consistent. I’m sure that’s more a reflection of me and which types of narratives I enjoy. Nonetheless, I have this sense with Bohjalian that when he’s on, he’s a narrative genius, and when he’s not, he’s Wally Lamb.

In this book, he wasn’t on. I’m going to veer from my general path of not spoiling books for future readers and talk about the plot. All of Bohjalian’s books hinge on tragedy, and frequently violence. In each, The Truth is contested, and in early books, this uncertainty is highlighted through the use of shifting first person narrative. It’s precisely because there is no single version of key events that the violence is usually not described in lurid detail, and this makes his books more readable for me. I probably should have put The Double Bind to the side when it became clear that the tragedy involved was a violent rape, which would have been when the jacket flap informed me that the main character rode her bike into the woods, had a terrible experience, and retreated from her friends and family, using photography as her only solace. Hmm, I wonder what the terrible experience could have been? Still, despite my distaste for violence against women as the hook on which to hang novels, I expected that Bohjalian was unlikely to treat the events in a graphic or voyeuristic fashion, and that aspect is true.

Nonetheless, I again should have stopped reading when Daisy Buchanan appeared in the narrative. Here I feel obligated to say: I don’t find The Great Gatsby to be the pinnacle of American literary achievement of the 20th century. I don’t even like the book very much. At all. I find the characterizations flat, the plot preposterous, and the ‘social commentary’ not witty or cutting or poignant or anything much at all. To revert 17 years in my analysis for a moment, the whole novel strikes me as boring and stupid. So, reading a novel that hinges inextricably on The Great Gatsby, was, for lack of a more sophisticated word, annoying. It’s true that The Double Bind is not a novel about The Great Gatsby: like Bohjalian’s other works, it’s a novel about loss, grief, dissociation, and healing. It just happens to use The Great Gatsby as the major lens through which these themes are explored.

So, what can I say? The novel is beautifully executed, as are all of his novels. I just wasn’t the audience, which I was too stubborn to accept as a reason to just take the book back to the library unread.

I picked up The Patron Saint of Liars, by Ann Patchett, at the library, as I’d enjoyed Bel Canto and not previously read any of her other stuff. I was a bit disappointed, truthfully. I know it’s a debut novel, and I tried to give it the tender consideration that such a thing deserves. Nonetheless, it fell flat for me. The changing viewpoints didn’t flow as well as in her later writing, which was a shame. Granted, there aren’t many writers who achieve excellence with a shifting first person narrative (several, but not all, of Chris Bohjalian‘s works do).

The book didn’t grab me. I kept waiting for the plot to become compelling, and it didn’t. As when I read Three Junes, I found myself treating each section of the book as a short story, strung together by shared characters. Perhaps that’s how Patchett meant the novel to be read, in which case, bravo! I don’t enjoy that narrative structure much; more when the vignettes are shorter, as with The House on Mango Street or The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing. Still, I mention those books as examples only; I didn’t love either of them, and I much prefer a short story collection with a theme such as Interpreter of Maladies or Strange Pilgrims, both of which are excellent reads.

In a nutshell, the novel is well-written and the prose flows. However, the plot didn’t engage me and the structure is one I find off-putting. So there you have it.

I had no idea what to expect from Cloud Atlas before I started reading it, and that’s the way I recommend experiencing the book. It’s a novel with striking similarities to Never Let Me Go, one of which is the pleasure of letting it unfold as it will, with no knowledge going into the reading of it. High praise, indeed, as Kazuo Ishiguro is one of my favorite authors, and I consider Never Let Me Go to be one of, if not the, best of his novels (The Unconsoled being the other main contender for that position). These are the type of book to savor as one goes, that leave the reader mulling the intricacies long after completing the novel. The less one knows about the content, the better, so I shall constrain my comments, and not mention the plot as such at all.

Not mentioning the plot leaves me with the writing itself. The writing itself is lovely; I agree with the critics that David Mitchell has a powerful command of the English language in written form. Each part of the book is lyrical and engaging in itself; taken together, the whole is an intricate puzzle. I had mixed reactions to the structure of the book. In the first half, the shifts are slightly jarring, but the lyrical prose draws you quickly and easily into each new segment. Once you know what to expect, each transition is a bit more smooth than the previous one. Still, I found the ending weak, and some of that was due to the constraint of the structure as established earlier on. Perhaps Mitchell is making a meta-point about history, and how we can only go as far as the foundation we’ve laid for ourselves in the past, that the limitations of the endings — of each segment, and the novel as a whole — bear out. Barring that, I’d say that the structure becomes less clever and more contrived through the second half of the book, and the engaging narratives get somewhat lost in the drive to wrap up. At the risk of giving away plot, the reliance on deaths as the vehicles for the end of narratives, a la Stephen King, contributed to my sense that the weak ending was simply weak, and not meant to be part of a grander commentary on the repetitive and inherently pointless nature of both novels and human history.

All that being said, the ending is not so weak as to diminish the general excellence of the book; it is one of the best I’ve read this year.

Family Tree is the only thing I’ve read by Barbara Delinksy. It caught my eye at the bookshop, and I borrowed it to have something to read on the bus. I didn’t expect much from it, and it delivered. The plot is one that has been cropping up in a lot of mass market fiction these days: white people discover they have African-American ancestors and all hell breaks loose. Much depends on the characters in these books, and in this one, the characters are very two-dimensional. Sensitive white liberal wife from humble roots embraces the possibility of a black ancestor; well-intentioned husband struggles with elitist and latently racist family norms in an effort to accept her and their obviously multiracial newborn, and then…plot twist! It’s the husband whose grandfather was black! Except that it’s an entirely obvious development, and not twisty at all.

I suspect I might have liked the novel better had it been written by a black person, as the author might then have chosen to omit various educational dialogues wherein the wife explains to the husband that he’s a hypocrite if he champions the rights of people of color in his professional life and then shuns their acquaintanceships socially (for example). The book would also have been better without the heavy-handed symbolism in the doll-playing of the biracial little girl next door or the periodic use of ‘African American’ as a noun, rather than as an adjective, which grated on me to no end.

Basically, if you’re a well-meaning white person who’s never considered the complex history of race in the United States, the myths we tell about it, the open secrets and interrelationships that constitute our cultural history, or the possibility that social hierarchies are categorically suspect, this book is for you! Otherwise, give it a miss and read some Nella Larsen.