Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse ***

I Cheerfully Refuse feels like a writer of paperback thrillers attempting a literary novel. From the first page, Enger's writing style reminded me of plot-driven mysteries, something about the way he introduces characters and sketches their quirks. Frequent references to Don Quixote, Odysseus, and Orpheus suggest ambitions beyond a ripping yarn. The fictional work that provides the title says "our job always and forever was to refuse Apocalypse in all its forms and work cheerfully against it."

The plot kept me guessing. Its lack of predictability carried me past the many things that irked me. The story takes place after a societal collapse whose details remain hazy. The narrator blithely pulls into strange harbors without considering potential dangers. He sailed once fifteen years ago, yet shows remarkable skill when he escapes onto Lake Superior in a pocket cruiser. The author introduces MacGuffins (the author Molly Thorn and the suicide drug Willow) only to forget about them.

As the story approaches its climax, Enger even seems to forget about the themes he raised in the first 100 pages. The book becomes the action movie it was always destined to be.

Richard Price, Lazarus Man *** 1/2

I associate Richard Price with extremely realistic urban settings, excellent dialogue, and the ability to evoke full-bodied characters with just a few sentences. These virtues are on full display in Lazarus Man. What's missing, though, is any narrative drive. A building collapses in East Harlem, and the titular character is pulled out of the rubble three days later. The book follows a handful of characters in the aftermath of the disaster, but none of them have a clear goal to move the story forward.

Price's theme becomes clear in retrospect as the novel reaches its conclusion. It's about our need to connect with people and the challenges (of trust, mostly) that make it difficult. Price's books have always included peripheral moments of surprising connection and tenderness—a brief scene with an abusive boyfriend in Freedomland is the moment I remember best—but here they are the main attraction. Once the denouement made this clear to me, I re-evaluated earlier parts of the story in a positive light and found myself moved.

Art Davidson, Minus 148⁰ **** 1/2

Minus 148⁰ tells the story of the first winter ascent of Mount McKinley in 1967. The title refers to the windchill-adjusted temperature on Denali Pass when three climbers bivouacked there, I first read it in high school alongside other classic mountaineering tales such as Annapurna.

Most mountaineering books emphasize the heroic nature of the undertaking and the participants. They focus on the elaborate logistics (Everest, The Hard Way), the technical difficulties (The White Spider), the strange psychology of climbers (Beyond the Mountain; Touching the Void), or the anatomy of a disaster (Into Thin Air). The eight climbers in Minus 148⁰ are more relatable characters. In their enthusiasm they underplan the expedition; the climb is more a matter of endurance than climbing skill; and the author honestly admits to the petty divisions that spring up between teammates under stress. The nominal leader of the expedition loses his passion for the climb while still on the lower slopes.

The title aside, Davidson doesn't dwell much on the temperature or the short days. Yes, they suffer from frostbite and sometimes have to travel in the dark, but the factor that brings them near disaster is the 150-mph winds at the pass.

Davidson and a couple of the others had climbed McKinley in the past. I would have liked to hear more about how the trip differed from a summer climb. For example, they were able to travel more quickly over the glacier because the colder snow was more firm.

Annika Norlin, The Colony ***

The Colony is a novel about a motley group of seven people who live together in a remote house in the Swedish countryside. A burnt-out journalist spies their odd behavior from her campsite and befriends the teenager who seems cut off from the rest of the group.

In the early chapters, I found the characters' motivations intriguing. In various ways they feel oppressed by the demands of social interaction. Emelie is tired of justifying her burn-out to people; Jozsef feels compelled to comfort people and broker peace when there are conflicts; Sara has the magnetism of a natural leader and hates the feeling of responsibility it gives her. These characters have interpersonal skills that make them successful sought-after companions, but they find those skills burdensome. They seek to create a community in which no one imposes expectations on the others.

This theme comes in and out of focus as the story progresses. The other Colony members have more clichéd trauma. The group's vision shifts from self-sufficiency to environmentalism. The members do have expectations of each other. Sara emerges as something of a cult leader. Arguments for the superiority of their lifestyle are unconvincing (to the reader). It becomes hard to believe that the Colony would stay intact for as long as it does.

The final unraveling of the Colony is fast and rather too convenient from a plot perspective.

Jeremy Denk, Every Good Boy Does Fine ***

This memoir from concert pianist Jeremy Denk covers his musical education from his first lessons at age seven through his doctorate from Julliard. He describes his piano teachers and what he learned from them in the context of his family and school life.

Denk is a very good writer, especially talented at capturing the day-to-day details of living as a young musician: finding the time (and motivation) to practice, questioning how important music is relative to other life goals, learning your teacher's personality, reconciling conflicting feedback, staying even-keeled in the face of (constructive?) criticism. He effectively conveys the mix of arrogance and insecurity he felt as a clearly talented pianist. I enjoyed the earlier parts of the book best, before Denk knows for sure he wants to become a professional musician.

I was less impressed with Denk's writing about music. He describes what he learns from his various teachers, but the lessons tend to be either generic (pay attention to the composer's dynamics markings, vary the attack on the keys, "make it sing") or specific to a particular piece of music (don't play Chopin's "Raindrop" sonata exactly in time). I appreciate the countless factors that a musician needs to balance, both technical and interpretative, but didn't gain much for my musical appreciation. The chapters on harmony, melody, and rhythm are far too metaphorical to be useful to me.

For me, one of the most fascinating rhythmic comparisons in the classical canon is between Mozart and Beethoven, who composed at close to the same time, and using related language, with astonishingly different results. ... Mozart balances stoppage and flow. He knows when to interrupt, when to elide (an underrated virtue), when to gently turn a corner. ... But if Mozart wrote the ideally timeless, Beethoven managed to write something quite different: music in search of time.

This excerpt starts with a promising notion but fails to elaborate on it.

P.S. I feel I have to note that Every Good Boy Does Fine has the most amateurish cover design I've ever seen from a major publisher. An unbalanced layout, clip-art pasted into the upper right, mismatched fonts. Denk explicitly thanks the designer in his acknowledgements, which makes me question his aesthetic taste.

Michael Crummey, The Adversary ***

An engaging enough story about a brother and sister vying for control of an isolated town on the north coast of Newfoundland. The brother is a drunken bully, the sister a ruthless antagonist. The townsfolk endure their violent rivalry, the plague, bad weather, marauding pirates, and poor fishing seasons. 

The story has a fairy-tale or morality-tale quality to it, with the genre's flat characters to match. The narrative often takes unexpected turns, usually when an unexpected tragedy upends the anticipated plot development. Crummey revels in Newfoundland slang; the Acknowledgements section lists primarily works of linguistic scholarship. 

Paul Hendrickson, Hemingway's Boat ****

Hemingway's Boat is not a biography of Ernest Hemingway nor a literary analysis of his work nor a character portrait of the man. It's a bit of all these things, anchored by an account of his 38-foot fishing vessel Pilar. The heart of the book describes Hemingway's purchase of the boat and the early years during which he used it as a pressure-release valve for his volatile personality. During the years 1934 to 1937, Hemingway wrote The Green Hills of Africa, became a world-class marlin fisherman, and raged against the mixed critical response to his recent work.

Hendrickson is a master at vividly describing prosaic incidents such as the day Hemingway ordered Pilar. He imagines all the thoughts and feelings his characters are having at the time. The book includes full portaits of minor characters such as the boat builder, the young writer who served as his ship's steward, and the foreign service officer who married Hemingway's secretary. The last third of the book focuses primarily on Ernest's youngest son Gregory.

Hendrickson has at least three distinct goals, and is largely successful at all three:

• Reconstruct the mental life of Hemingway and his compatriots during a critical period
• Show that he could be supportive, loyal, and compassionate alongside his well-documented and undeniable egotism, boorishness, and malice
• Propose that his lifelong struggle with mental illness made his successes (as well as Gregory's) heroic

Hemingway's Boat has an idiosyncratic (lack of) structure. It's too long and goes too far afield, but it has a great humanity to it.