Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief *** 1/2

I'm not typically a fan of multi-generational family stories, but I enjoyed MacLeod's short stories and No Great Mischief was named the greatest Atlantic Canadian book of all time. Plus I really like the look and feel of the paperback edition.

The narrator, one of three characters named Alexander MacDonald, is part of clann Calum Ruadh, the descendants of "red" Calum MacDonald who emigrated from Scotland to Cape Breton. Although family stories reach back to Calum and to formative Highland events like the Battle of Cullodun, No Great Mischief mostly sticks to the narrator's life.

No Great Mischief tells its story in a gentle empathetic tone that reminded me of A River Runs Through It. The plot is more a series of episodes than an integrated narrative, but many of the episodes are memorable: traveling across the ice to the lighthouse where they lived, the horse that helped the brothers pull their boat from the water, crossing to Cape Breton Island in a storm.

They went one day to cut timber for a skidway they were making for their boat. They went into a tightly packed grove of spruce down by the shore. In the middle of the grove, they saw what they thought was the perfect tree. It was tall and straight and over thirty feet tall. They notched it as they had been taught and then they sawed it with a bucksaw. When they had sawed it completely through, nothing happened. The tree's upper branches were so densely intertwined with those of the trees around it that it just remained standing. ... When the wind blew, the whole grove would move and sigh. ... You would never realize that in its midst there was a tall straight tree that was severed at its stump.

Mary Pilon, The Kevin Show **1/2

The Kevin Show is a biography of Kevin Hall, an Olympic sailor who suffers from mental illness, specifically a form of bipolar disorder known as The Truman Show syndrome. During manic episodes, Kevin imagines that he is the star of a worldwide reality show that is helping to solve global poverty.

Kevin was a successful junior sailor, and he eventually made the US Olympic team sailing Finns and served on the America's Cup crew for Team Artemis. He started having manic episodes during college, and also had testicular cancer (twice) around the same time.

The Kevin Show gives a well rounded picture of the difficulties of living with mental illness, both for the sufferer and his family and friends. It discusses societal and philosophical questions about what it means to treat mental issues as an illness while still holding individuals responsible for their own behavior. However, the prose is pedestrian and I often had trouble keeping track of Kevin's many moves. It felt to me like Pilon had arranged her copious notes into their proper order but hadn't gone back through to provide shading, drama, and smooth transitions. 

Alice Feeney, Sometimes I Lie **

Amber wakes up in the hospital on Boxing Day in a coma. She can't quite remember what happened to her, but she knows it isn't good. She mentally reviews the activities of the past week -- an ultimatum at work, her husband spending time with her sister, a chance encounter with an old flame, maybe a pregnancy -- and thinks back to her childhood diaries. It's immediately apparent that there's something odd about Amber, and the twists start coming about halfway through.

I'm all for unreliable narrators and psychological thrillers, but none of the characters in Sometimes I Lie exhibit recognizable human behavior, not just the THREE who turn out to be psychopaths. And that's before you toss in the imaginary friend, the identity switches, the clueless husbands, and the plethora of murders successfully disguised as accidents.

Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg ** 1/2

My standards for books about Alaska and the Inside Passage are high after reading Alaska Blues, Passage to Juneau, Coming into the Country, Going to Extremes, and various similar books. (I even have one more -- The Curve of Time -- sitting on my "to read" shelf.) Tip of the Iceberg falls short of those standards.

Adams introduces his "3000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska" as following in the footsteps of the 1899 Harriman Expedition, similar to how Tony Horwitz followed Captain Cook in Blue Latitudes. Harriman was a railroad tycoon who brought a large team of scientists and naturalists on an all-expenses-paid steamship trip from Seattle to Siberia. The team published a popular multiple volume report when they returned. Adams spends a couple of chapters introducing members of the team, but then rarely mentions them again. He refers far more frequently to John Muir's previous visits to the area.

That's the organizational problem. The other problem is that Adams chooses hackneyed details to illustrate his points. He talks about Alaskans being conservative by mentioning their guns and how they refer to "the Soviet state of Seattle." His natural descriptions all start to sound the same.

Frederick Barthelme, There Must Be Some Mistake ***

Frederick Barthelme usually gets compared to other Southern writers or other so-called minimalists, but I'm going to make a more offbeat comparison. Reading Frederick Barthelme books is like watching Yasujirō Ozu films.

All of his works take place in the same locale and milieu, with essentially the same characters, with stories that highlight mundane everyday activities and feature strong women. In the good ones, the particularities resonate in a way that produces tenderness, humor, and universality; in the less good ones, it feels like nothing actually happened.

Barthelme stories take place in condos along the Gulf Coast, with indolent men and the interesting women who love them. In There Must Be Some Mistake, Wallace lives outside of Galveston in a condo complex that is experiencing a rash of deaths. It has more plot than many Barthelme books do -- as the New York Times Book Review said, it "often reads like an amusing existential satire of the detective novel" -- although I found it less funny. 

Laurie Gwen Shapiro, The Stowaway ***

The Stowaway is the true story of a seventeen-year-old boy who gained a spot on the crew for Richard Byrd's 1928 Antarctic expedition after twice being removed from its ships as a stowaway.  Billy Gawronski received lots of local (NYC) press coverage at the time for his perseverance, but his story, like the enthusiasm for the American explorer Byrd, has largely been forgotten.

Shapiro tells Billy's story in a workmanlike fashion, smoothly fitting the story into its context with lots of asides about other events happening at the same time. The tone is not too different from the boy's adventure stories that inspired Billy to stow away in the first place. Shapiro sticks closely to the facts rather than emphasizing the adventure narrative.