Tom Newlands, Only Here, Only Now ****

Only Here, Only Now is a coming-of-age story narrated by a Scottish teenage girl in the mid-1990s. She lives in a rundown former coal-mining town and dreams of moving away to the big city of Glasgow.

I was a bit bored in the early going, due to a lack of dramatic action. The introduction of a new stepfather felt rather clichéd. What kept me going was the colorful Scottish dialect and the sense that the people in Cora's life genuinely had her best interest at heart—meaning I wasn't in for the miserabilism so common in this type of book. On the contrary, Cora seemed to recognize the virtues of the people she interacted with even as she felt disappointed in them. This sense of positivity increased as I grew fond of Cora and her milieu.

My one complaint is that the author leans too hard on the idea that Cora is not neurotypical. The first words in Tom Newlands author biography are "multiply neurodivergent," reviewers compare it to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, and the book finishes with a note about the rate of ADHD diagnoses in the UK in the 1990s. Cora frequently cites diagnostic phrases from "printouts" she got from the school counselor.

The emphasis on ADHD bothered me for a few reasons. First, I felt that most of Cora's actions and responses seemed appropriate for any discontented teen, and that attributing them to a condition made them less relatable. Second, Cora is too self-aware and articulate about her behavior. Third, Newland expects us to believe that Cora's mam and her stepfather Gunner are unaware of her ADHD despite the explicit diagnosis from the school counselor. I think the story works better if we don't read it as being about "loss, resilience, and undiagnosed ADHD in 90's Scotland."

Allegra Goodman, Isola ****

Inspired by a true story, Isola is about a sixteenth-century French woman whose guardian squanders her fortune and abandons her on a small island in the Gulf of St Lawrence. 

The first half of the book paints a convincing picture of our heroine's privilege and her powerlessness. The machinations that determine her fate all happen elsewhere, at court, only whispered about in the rumors of servants. The settings—her childhood château, the guardian's house in town, the merchant ship, the island—are well drawn. Overall, I found the novel engaging.

My only problem with Isola was the anachronistic attitudes of the heroine and narrator. I found most of the characters' actions to be appropriate for the period (1531 - 1545), but Marguerite's reactions to them are conspicuously modern. The cover of my paperback edition calls the book "a feminist castaway tale about love, faith, and self-actualization"; feminism and self-actualization are twentieth-century notions which would have made no sense to a sixteenth-century noblewoman. I appreciated the times when Marguerite struggled with her faith, and cringed when she demanded respect for things to which she felt she was entitled.

 

Nancy Lemann, Lives of the Saints ** 1/2

I sought out Lives of the Saints after it was lauded by multiple reviewers of Lemann's new book The Oyster Diaries. The reviewers note the narrator's "frank, sardonic, bookish, self-absorbed and neurotic" voice and the story's New Orleans setting. Sounds right up my alley!

Comedy, when it does not strike you funny, feels curiously flat. You can see the jokes and why they might be funny, but the timing or something seems off. The same goes for wry narration. I could see that Lemann's style was unique and "as witty as it is melancholy," but I couldn't enjoy it.

I met someone the other day who was just like you—he yearned after vague things. You could tell, when you asked him about his job, that what he really liked to do was just to yearn after vague things.

The (meta-)vagueness of this description is clever and almost funny, but in the end it is too nebulous and too repetitive. Those are precisely the adjectives I would apply to the writing style overall.

When I hand out a two-star rating to anyone other than Dean Koontz, I feel compelled to clarify that my rating relates to my enjoyment of the book and to the likelihood that I would recommend it to other readers. I certainly don't want to suggest that Lives of the Saints is an objectively bad book; I just didn't connect with the narrative voice.

Ben Lerner, Transcription ***

Transcription is short enough and slight enough to count as a (long) short story rather than a novel. It riffs on how our relationship with smartphones shifts our experience of the world, but doesn't offer real insights. The individual incidents are well drawn but don't enrich each other.

Lerner retains his "impressive if over-intellectualized writing style." I was impressed by how vividly he painted the character of Thomas, the 90-year-old artist, with very few strokes outside of dialogue. In the short middle section, he nails the atmosphere of an academic conference.

Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do ****

Traffic is a popular science book that explores a variety of topics related to driving: the mysterious causes of jams, why the other lane always seems to move faster, the theory behind metering lights, the underappreciated complexity of the task, the inescapable human factors that defy careful planning.

I first read this book in 2009. I remembered it as a fascinating collection of tidbits about traffic engineering, improving road utilization and safety. The introduction, for example, considers the question of what a driver should do when they see a sign announcing the imminent closing of the left lane; should you merge right as early or as late as you can?

In an effort to be comprehensive, Traffic also includes a lot of pop psychology to explain why we are worse drivers than we think we are, and the last chapter throws in inconclusive statistics about what causes accidents. (The subtitle hints at this, I suppose.) I found those parts trite and less compelling. The book is also starting to be dated, especially with the era of the self-driving car upon us.

Hisham Matar, My Friends ** 1/2

My Friends is a novel about three Libyan men living in England during Qaddafi's reign, and their differing responses when that regime begins to falter. As in his non-fiction book The Return, Matar effectively conveys the emotion strain of living in exile.

I find Matar's writing style to be overly ornate, with strained metaphors and a plethora of Conradian subordinate clauses. My Friends is organized as a series of memories as our narrator Khaled walks home after seeing off his friend Hosam at the train station, but the conceit is applied sparingly, making it disorienting when Khaled refers to his location in the present day.

Lastly, Khaled is a disappointingly passive character. His personality is ill-defined, making it hard to understand what attracts Mustafa and Hosam to him. I didn't feel his passion for literature.

Tove Jansson, The Summer Book **** 1/2

The Summer Book is a quiet, meditative novel about a six-year-old girl and her grandmother spending time together at their summer house on an island in the Gulf of Finland. The girl's father is there too, always in the background (he has a single line of dialogue, three pages from the end). Her mother has recently died, which no one talks about but which accounts for the existential undertone to many of the conversations.

The book consists of twenty-two "crystalline" vignettes about everyday life on the island, each one nearly a standalone story. Jannson's writing has lovely imagery that merely suggests the associated emotional depths. As Ali Smith says on the back cover, "Her sentences [are] simple and loaded; the novel reads like looking through clear water and seeing, suddenly, the depth."