Thomas Hurka, The Best Things in Life ***

The Best Things in Life is a short philosophical treatise on making the right choices for the best possible life. I was a bit surprised to find that Hurka means "best" in the ethical sense, for a life with the highest level of virtue rather than the most fulfilling.

The consideration of the possible candidates for highest good – pleasure, knowledge, achievement, moral virtue, love – is clear and practical but fairly familiar to anyone who has thought about the issues before. Hurka's two most interesting arguments are about how pleasure and pain are not equal in value (an "equivalent" amount of pain is worse) and how knowledge and achievement are complementary aspects of a proper connection between ourselves and the world (knowledge is our mind conforming to the world; achievement is the world responding to our will).

Rene Denfield, The Enchanted ** 1/2

The Enchanted is well written, but I feel like there's a fatal mismatch between its form and content. The story takes place in a dilapidated old prison and follows a death row investigator hired to help inmates escape execution. The narrator is an inmate with selective mutism who views the story though the prism of his madness and the books he reads. His perspective imbues everything with wonder and enchantment, making the story sound like a fable. The main characters don't get names; they are just the lady, the fallen priest, the warden.

The author has worked as a death row investigator, and it shows. The best aspect of the book is the details about life in prison. But her goal is to celebrate "the human capacity to transcend even the most nightmarish reality," so the realistic details get overlaid with luminous mumbo-jumbo.

The yard smells when it rains in the summer... and I think about each clod of mud and how it contains the history of the world: shards of mica and stone, glossy ribbons of clay too faint to see, the arm and leg of Eve, the pulsating pull of Adam... With every exhalation, I find a way out of this enchanted place.

I also question Denfield's choice of narrator. She probably had in mind Chief from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but our unnamed narrator has no way to know (or understand) most of what he describes.

P.S. I bought The Enchanted along with Boy, Snow, Bird and The People in the Trees from the "3-for-2" table at Powell's Books. Coincidentally, all three have female authors and sprinkle elements of fantasy over basically realistic premises. The Enchanted was the weakest of the three, so I'll consider it to be the one I got for free.

Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees ****

The People in the Trees is the faux memoir of a Nobel Prize-winning doctor who discovers a possible secret to immortality among the people on a remote Micronesian island, only to fall into disgrace when he is accused on sexually assaulting some of the dozens of children he adopted from the island.

Our unreliable narrator Dr Norton Perina is a wonderfully prickly literary creation: arrogant and disparaging of others, always with solid reasoning. Once he arrives on Ivu'ivu, his physical descriptions are outstanding but offbeat:

...feeling the floor [of the jungle] beneath me gently buckling and heaving with unseen layers of worms and beetles as I placed my feet upon them; it could feel like treading on the wet innards of a large dozing beast.

The story of the Ivu'ivuans and of Perina's discovery are interesting and well-told, and the ultimate consequences for the island nation are unfortunately realistic. I was surprised that the book was more about cross-cultural contact than it was about the lure of immortality.

For all of its strengths, I have two reservations about The People in the Trees, two lost opportunities, I think. First, Perina's colleague Rob Kubodera, who wrote the preface and edited the memoir, sounds too similar to Perina: he doesn't have a distinctive voice. Second, the chapters relating to Perina's children are comparatively sketchy and don't really add to our understanding of the characters or the themes of the book. They could have been much stronger.

Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird ***

The back cover of Boy, Snow, Bird says that it "recasts the 'Snow White' fairy tale," but that's not quite true. The story does have a central character named Snow Whitman whose stepmother sends her away, but it also has allusions to other fairy tales like the Three Blind Mice and Cinderella. The fairy tale elements provide color rather than an organizing principle.

Once every few chapters, all of the pieces come together beautifully: the prose, the themes, and the plot. The first chapter is wonderful, as is the chapter introducing the first major plot twist. Between them, however, I felt like the story drifted aimlessly. And the last plot twist was a twist too far, in my opinion.

Stripped of its fairy tale trappings, Boy, Snow, Bird is a story about the ethics of "passing" -- light-skinned blacks passing as white. The saddest incident came when Boy, the obviously colored daughter who reveals the family's race, dresses as Alice in Wonderland for Halloween but everyone sees her as a housekeeper or washerwoman. This episode clearly relates to the fraught relationship the characters have with mirrors.

I was also intrigued by the characterization of the "evil" stepmother as being evil "not powers of darkness or something you can protect yourself from with crosses and holy water... [but she would] find someone who was unhappy, and once she'd found them she'd use her gift to make it worse." She avoided happy people.

I should also mention that the cover of the paperback edition is beautifully designed.