Binnie Kirshenbaum, Rabbits for Food ****

 A mordant novel about a woman dealing with depression. The first half describes the New Years Eve when Bunny's depression tipped over into a condition requiring hospitalization; the second half covers her first three weeks in the psychiatric ward. Interspersed throughout are Bunny's assignments from the hospital's Creative Writing activity, most of which are anecdotes from Bunny's childhood.

There's nothing too remarkable about Bunny's story; in fact, many of the incidents are nearly cliché for stories about mental illness. But Kirshenbaum captures something elusive in her prose. The early chapters, for instance, illustrate the fine line between a sardonic worldview and depression; the chapters in the hospital show tacit compassion for Bunny's fellow patients.

A few of my favorite parts:

• The story about when young Bunny opted out of a family Thanksgiving in favor of some alone time. Her sister came back to gleefully tell her that nobody even asked where she was. "In retrospect, that was my happiest Thanksgiving ever."
• In order to get the hospital staff to quit pestering them about joining in activities, a few of the patients set up a Monopoly board on the table between them, then did their own things.
• The story about the time when Bunny's husband Albie agreed to get her some cantaloupe without hesitation. It was a clear portrait of Albie's character in 300 words or less.

Brian Castner, Disappointment River ** 1/2

Well, I suppose the word is right there at the front of the title.

I am a connoisseur of books where an author retraces the travels of an historical explorer through a compelling landscape, such as Jonathan Raban's Passage to Juneau. This approach is a means for the author to color their descriptions of an exotic place with insights from their historical significance, and to show the present is shaped by the past. In Disappointment River, the place is the Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories of Canada, the explorer is Alexander Mackenzie, and the historical context is the 18th-century fur trade and the quest for a Northwest Passage to Asian markets.

Disappointment River was well written but let me down in several ways.

First of all, there's no map. The story describes voyages through the pays d'en haut (Upper Country), but any time I wanted to get a sense of where they were –– which was often –– I had to pull out my atlas, which didn't always use the eighteenth century place names.

Second, Mackenzie's voyage and Castner's don't illuminate or enrich each other. Both explorers are so wrapped up in their daily struggles with weather and mosquitoes and logistics that they fail to capture their surroundings. For example, at one point Castner and his partner appear to be struggling in the wilderness along a tricky section of the river, when suddenly a barge nearly swamps them. So there is commercial traffic this far up the river? Chapters alternate between the trips, but they feel completely unrelated; even the country sounds different.

Third, the balance between adventure and historical context is off kilter. The first half of the book outlines Mackenzie's childhood and describes the business of the fir trade. Mackenzie and his modern counterpart don't arrive at the mouth of the river until page 138, almost exactly half way through the book.

Lastly, I think it's misleading to suggest that the Mackenzie River represents a Northwest Passage. First of all, it provides a passage only for the far northern section of the fur trapping area: the trip to the headwaters at Great Slave Lake remains arduous. Also, in Mackenzie's time the outlet in the Arctic Ocean was icebound.

Albert Vigoleis Thelen, The Island of Second Sight **** 1/2

 I had never heard of this book before encountering it on a display shelf at Half Price Books. "One of the greatest books of the twentieth century," says Thomas Mann, but it was the other blurb on the cover that hooked me: "Farcical, byzantine, and philosophical... One of the most unusual and entertaining books I have ever read" –– The New York Times Book Review. Farcical! Byzantine! Philosophical! The back cover revealed one more tidbit that convinced me I had to read the 750-page German novel: "Winner of the 2013 PEN Translation Prize."

The Island of Second Sight is a fictionalized memoir –– "a book of recollections shaped by poetic means" –– about the author's time as a German expatriate in Mallorca during the 1930s. The first half is largely about their adventures in poverty; the second about their travails as outspoken critics of the rising fascist regimes in Germany and Spain. The tone is comic; the entertainment comes from the elaborate cosmopolitan prose style. People will praise an actor by saying they would listen to him read the phone book; I will praise Thelen by saying I would read a phone book he had written. I can't comment on the accuracy of the translation, but it was certainly an impressive feat given the constant wordplay.

The book is composed of a series of incidents more than a developing narrative. It is divided into Books based on the author's residence at the time: his brother-in-law's home, a rooming house owned by a Count, a bordello in a converted stable, a mostly empty apartment. There are numerous comic set pieces (weaving through Palma to avoid their creditors; hanging their belongings from the rafters of their tiny bordello room to protect them from the rats; serving as an unreliable tourist guide) and colorful Dickensian characters both human and animal. Piece by piece, indirectly, the book paints a picture of Mallorca, Spanish society, and the German diaspora during the rise of the Nazis. The stakes get more serious as the years pass, culminating in a positively tense epilogue about avoiding execution as they negotiate departure from the island.

"Vigoleis can never stick to his subject. He's not a nuclear scientist, and always finds more interesting things going on at the margins." In a book this long and digressive, there are inevitably sections that drag, where the comedy falls flat and you want the author to return to the main story. I found that the entertaining sections far outweighed the leaden ones, but I suppose your mileage may vary.

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."