Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror ***

 I was drawn to Trick Mirror by its subtitle, "Reflections on Self-Delusion," and sold on it by this part of the introduction:

When I feel confused about something, I write about it until I turn into the person who shows up on paper: a person who is plausibly trustworthy, intuitive, and clear. It's exactly this habit – or compulsion – that makes me suspect that I am fooling myself. If I were, in fact, the calm person who shows up on paper, why would I always need to hammer out a narrative that gets me there?

Trick Mirror is a collection of essays that circle around the idea that our self images are stories we tell ourselves, just as our public personas are stories we project to others, and that society dictates the range of available stories. The specific subjects and arguments are familiar ones – how the Internet substitutes "virtue signaling" for action, the seven scams that define the millennial generation, religion and drugs as paths to ecstatic experience, rape culture on college campuses, the wedding industrial complex – but Tolentino covers them with a smidgen more insight and a more personal touch than your typical magazine article.

For example, when talking about the gig economy, Tolentino notes that popular opinion is that millennials prefer the freedom of freelancing because "it's just easier to be think millennials float from gig to gig because we're shiftless or spoiled or in love with the 'hustle' than to consider the fact that the labor market is punitively unstable and growing more so every day." She follows this point with a story about her own professional life.

Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead *** 1/2

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a murder mystery that takes place in a remote Polish hamlet near the Czech border. Our narrator Janina is one of the few year-round residents of the Plateau, and the story starts with the death of her neighbor Big Foot. He choked on a bone from a deer that he had poached, and Janina believes that the deer murdered him. When a few more local hunters turn up dead, she promotes the idea that the animals are seeking retribution.

The author is a Nobel laureate, so you know the book has more on its mind than just a whodunit. Janina is a philosophical woman whose aptitude in astrology reflects her interest in the workings of fate and a world out of balance. She is an advocate for the animals who may be granting humans their comeuppance.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is nowhere near as interesting as Flights, but it has a definite atmosphere and its philosophical concerns emerge naturally from the story.

But why should we have to be useful and for what reason? Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right? Does a thistle have no right to life, or a Mouse that eats the grain in a warehouse? What about Bees and Drones, weeds and roses? Whose intellect can have had the audacity to judge who is better, and who worse? A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be made out of it. This example should raise the spirits of people like us. Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless.

Richard Kreitner, Break It Up ***

 Break It Up is a history of the United States told with an emphasis on the forces tending to dis-unite us. That is, it relates the incidents –– nearly continuous since before the Revolution –– when some portion of the population considered seceding from the Union. For instance, the area west of the Appalachians pursued secession in the late 18th century because they had greater economic and social ties to the Spanish Mississippi than to the eastern federal government, and New England pondered it just as the South did before the Civil War.

The revisionist approach provides a fascinating and challenging view of our history. The book is chock full of fascinating incidents, some of which I was aware of but were presented differently, others which I hadn't heard of. However, Kreitner covers most of them superficially. I was frequently frustrated when he glossed quickly past an inherently dramatic episode. Perhaps he tried to cover too much ground? In addition to draining the narrative excitement, it made it hard to differentiate between serious incidents and fringe conspiracies. I was also disappointed that the last chapter shifted to our political polarization (with a notably pessimistic liberal slant) rather than geographical secession.

I learned about a few events that I'd like to follow up on, such as the Haverhill petition (1842), when a town in Massachusetts requested that Congress dissolve the Union. John Quincy Adams came across as a particularly interesting character.

Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier ***

Two aging Irish criminals hang out at the ferry terminal in Algeciras Spain, hoping to find the estranged daughter of one of them. They ruminate about their lost youth, interrogate young people who enter the terminal, and engage in comic business. Chapters alternate between their vigil and flashbacks to their ignominious past.

Night Boat to Tangier would make a good play. The present day chapters in particular have a theatrical feel to them,  a riff of Waiting for Godot. All dialogue, a minimalist set, and actions that sound like stage directions:

Maurice lies back across the bench, as though laid out for the deadhouse, with his hands clasped decorously at the chest. Charlie Redmond drops an invisible set of rosary beads into his friend's palmed clasp.

The flashback chapters range farther afield but could be easily adapted for the stage. The story wouldn't lose a bit of its "dark humor and hard-boiled Hibernian lyricism."