Susie Steiner, Persons Unknown ***

Persons Unknown is the follow-up to Missing, Presumed, featuring most of the same characters (excluding the wrongdoers, of course). It leans more heavily on the domestic drama than Missing, Presumed did: in this one, Manon is pregnant and largely on the sidelines of the case. The frankness with which the characters reveal their insecurities is the most distinctive aspect of both books.

The murder victim is Manon's sister's ex-husband, which doesn't really fit with the rest of his background story but is necessary so that the plot can make Manon's adopted son the prime suspect. As in Missing, Presumed, the most interesting character is a tangential one: in Missing, Presumed it was the missing girl's mother; in Persons Unknown it's the shopkeeper who shelters the girl at the center of the mystery.

And boy, they sure seem to have CCTV cameras everywhere in Britain!

Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed ***

Missing, Presumed is a solid but generic police procedural in which Cambridgeshire policewoman Manon Bradshaw searches for a missing woman while also dealing with personal feelings of loneliness. Steiner adds a dollop of ambition to the book by having many of its characters dealing with perceived missing elements in their lives, giving the title a double meaning.

Several characters take turns as the point-of-view character. Authors typically use this device to add tension because each character knows different things or to offer distinctive voices, but neither of these tricks happen here.

I received Missing, Presumed for Christmas along with its follow-up Persons Unknown. More Manon on the horizon!

John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat ****

It might seem odd that I bought this book about "Japan in the Wake of World War II" from the bookshop at Pearl Harbor, but it was a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner sitting alongside what seemed like mostly jingoistic tourist bait. I'm also interested in the subject of forming new societies after violent overthrows, such as in Ten Days that Shook the World and Red Star Over China.

Embracing Defeat covers the American occupation of Japan from August 1945 to April 1952, mostly from the Japanese point of view. It is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, with major sections about Japanese popular culture, the promulgation of its new constitution, and the Tokyo war crimes trials. Dower is able to show how the Japanese felt about the major events and to provide clear analysis, so I felt like I got a good sense for the time and place even though I wasn't familiar with most of the incidents he described.

The main message I will remember is that many consequences of the occupation flowed from General MacArthur's single decision to retain the emperor. That decision dictated the shape of the constitution, who got tried as war criminals, and how far the Americans allowed indigenous social movements to go. In the latter half of the occupation, Cold War considerations started to take precedence.

The book didn't cover economic issues very thoroughly because Dower has apparently covered this subject elsewhere.

Catherine Lacey, The Answers *** 1/2

Mary Parsons suffers from an unknown full-body illness that resists treatment until she tries Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia (PAKing). To pay for the expensive treatments, she finds a second job as part of a social science Girlfriend Experiment: a team of researchers divide up the various roles of a girlfriend (emotional support, mundane day-to-day tasks, maternal assistance, fights) among different women and measure the participants responses to learn how to build the perfect relationship. Mary is the Emotional Girlfriend, even though her emotional responses are somewhat odd due to her strange parents.

I appreciated that The Answers doesn't have a typical structure and that it asks big questions about who we are and what we want from relationships. However, I felt like there was too much going on, too many unusual situations without a realistic platform to view it from. Every character and every story strand was off-kilter, so it was hard to think about the real-world implications of its ideas. Some of its ideas were intriguing, though ("Love is a compromise for only getting to be one person").

I might take another crack at this book in a few years to see whether it fits together when I look at it from a different angle.

George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo **** 1/2

I actually listened to Lincoln in the Bardo, rather than read it. The story is narrated collectively by over 150 characters, so the audiobook seems like a more natural way to experience it. Hearing the different readers helped provide distinct personalities for each character, not to mention adding emotional color to the old-fashioned diction.

Lincoln in the Bardo takes place the night after Abraham Lincoln's eleven-year-old son Willie is buried. President Lincoln uses the prerogative of his office to get back into the cemetery after dark, to mourn alone. But he's not alone, because a variety of spirits live there and witness his unprecedented visit. They narrate the story while also telling us their own stories. It's an innovative and unusual structure, leading to review headlines like this one.

Saunders captures the tone in the very first chapters. The most prominent spirit, Hans Vollman (Nick Offerman in the audiobook), describes how he married a much younger woman, treated her with great tenderness, and was about to consummate the marriage when he "fell sick" from a ceiling beam to the head. He has been waiting ever since in his "sick box," which he reluctantly admits that he pooped in when he first arrived here. His narration is old-fashioned, compassionate, and just a little bit silly.

The book addresses big subjects like the meaning of life and death, and builds its own cosmology from an amalgam of Buddhist and Christian ideas. (The bardo is a Buddhist concept; one of the lead spirits is a minister.) The fancy structure distances us enough that Saunders can show us the most extreme emotions without tipping into melodrama.

His mind was freshly inclined to sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in the world one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content, all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone and, given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help, or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it.

Darran Anderson, Imaginary Cities **

I picked up Imaginary Cities based on a year-end recommendation from the A.V. Club. I expected it to describe imaginary cities (from Atlantis and Xanadu to Metropolis and New Crobuzon from Perdido Street Station) and examine what their construction tells us about our attitudes towards real cities. I hoped it might also compare purely fictional world-building to the literary presentation of "real" cities like Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul or The Third Man's Vienna.

Unfortunately, Imaginary Cities takes a different approach. Anderson writes in an epigrammatic style that moves (too) quickly from point to point while tossing out unattributed references to high and low culture. It feels like Anderson is trying to disguise his jejune observations with a thicket of allusions and lit-crit theory to make them seem profound.

"Oh, where are the snows of yesteryear!" wrote François Villon, the finest poet ever to have killed a priest in a knife fight...

The control of space and those within it is crucial to dystopias. The manual for tyranny is essentially a guide to the manipulation of architecture. 

A disappointing start to 2018. On the plus side, I did learn about the existence of hoboglyphs.

John Williams, Stoner *** 1/2

The website Vulture occasionally asks actors, musicians, or artists for their ten favorite books. I learned about Stoner from Michael C. Hall's list. It is a portrait of an unremarkable English professor in Missouri during the first part of the 20th century. He grows up on a farm, finds his mind expanded by literature, falls in love with a banker's daughter, and experiences career setbacks.

It sounds strange to say, but the greatest strength of Stoner is how it doesn't explain the characters' various epiphanies. The author allows the experience to be as mysterious to us as it is to the characters. For example, Stoner's transformation from a farmer to a scholar happens after he fails to answer a question in class. Williams describes the incident and Stoner's dazed stroll after class, but doesn't attempt to plumb the depths of his motivations. The book is as inarticulate as the characters are when they are asked to explain themselves.

Another strength is Stoner's quietly positive attitude. Many apparently bad things happen to poor William Stoner, but as he says late in the book, he sees the events as his life and he can't regret them. He remains stoic-ly optimistic.