Michael Connelly, Jess Walter, Charlotte Wood, T.J. Klune, Steven Wright

 

 This week I’ve featured John Irving’s new novel and an older one from Mark Haddon. Here’s a book clean-out in short review form. One must move some books out to make room for others!

 

Mysteries Solved:

 

 I enjoy mysteries, cozy and not. Now that I’ve exhausted most of the Robert Parker collection, Michael Connelly has replaced him as my go-to read. I quite enjoyed The Drop (2011, 387 pages). This is a Harry Bosch novel whose very title involves a twist. Harry has been an LAPD homicide detective for many years about to retire. He’s not on active cases because he’s in the transitional Deferred Retirement Option Plan (DROP) for four years. To keep him out of trouble he’s in the Open-Unsolved unit that looks at cold cases to see if they should be reopened using new methods. Harry is looking into a murder/rape from 1989 and discovers that the now 29-year-old man convicted of the crime was just 8 years old when sent to adult court. Harry smells corruption. At the same time, Harry is handed a new case. The son of City Councilman Irvin Irving is found dead outside a fancy hotel. Irving was once a cop who disliked Harry and now has the power to cut funding for DROP. Shockingly, Irving demands that Harry investigate his son’s demise; he hates Harry, but trusts him to ferret out the truth. Did his son jump or was he dropped from above? Irving is furious when Harry works both cases at once and also finds some time for romance. Not to mention Harry’s deep dive into feuding taxi cab companies.

 

I also enjoyed Connelly’s The Night Fire (2019,  456 pages). This Bosch novel also includes LAPD Renée Ballard, who is new school to Harry’s old school methods. Ballard lives in her car and has been demoted to the graveyard shift after accusing a superior of sexual harassment. She’s tough and fearless, which is exactly what scares Bosch. Renée hangs out in an unsavory neighborhood and is investigating possible homicide when a homeless man dies in a tent fire. For his part, Harry has been given a murder book by the widow of a deceased cop friend. Why? To complicate things further, a judge is stabbed to death in broad daylight in a public park. There is DNA evidence linking a young man arrested for the judge’s murder. He is being defended by Mickey Haller, who knows Harry. Is there a connection between the judge, the fire, and a long ago murder? Get the feeling something much bigger is at play?     

 

 

Inspires: 

Jess Walter is an author who seeks unique ways to tell a story. In his dark satirical novel The Financial Life of the Poets Walter takes potshots at the 2007-09 housing market collapse and financial crisis. The Arizona Republic cogently summed it as a novel that “would be sad if it weren’t so funny and so funny it if weren’t so sad.” At age 46, Matt Prior is living the middle-class dream: a nice house, a lovely wife (Lisa), and two boys. He’s also typical in that he’s leveraged up to his eyeteeth, his kids are struggling in school, and Lisa’s e-Bay business is tanking. Matt foresees the decline of newspapers, but makes the first of a series of bad choices by quitting his job and launching a Website dispensing financial advice in the form of blank verse (no ending rhymes). Who wants a haiku on adjustable mortgages or stock advice in the form of a sonnet? No one. When the excrement hits the air circulation device, Matt is so broke that he needs to raise $30,000 in seven days or he will lose his house. His senile father is no help; he was bilked by a Las Vegas stripper! Matt is wallowing in so much desperation that when he meets a group of young guys of questionable character at the local 7-Eleven he ends up smoking powerful dope with them and surrendering his favorite slippers!  Soon, Matt wants to buy more pot to sell. Not the best idea as it’s illegal, plus there are some serious bad guys who are all about turf. Soon, Matt is the verge of losing his marriage as well, as Lisa seems to be having a Facebook affair with an old flame. (Not that her decisions are any better.) Will the Priors join those families that went down in flames? This is a satire in which you laugh and say “ouch!”

 

 

 

Don’t laugh, but I learned about Stoneyard Devotional (2023, 291 pages) from Sarah Jessica Parker. She’s a serious reader who has served on Booker Prize committees. This novel from Australian author Charlotte Wood was shortlisted for a 2024 Booker. I might have voted for Wood for her skill in compiling a short novel that feels like non-fiction. An unnamed middle-aged burn-out case leaves Sydney to rejuvenate at a rural monastery. She never returns, though she’s neither a believer nor a member of the Catholic Church. She is attracted by the routine and the relative silence. Wood’s novel is  akin to opening a detailed diary recounting the three big crises of her time there. The first is the nunnery’s mouse infestation, by which I mean so many mice that trenches are dug for three-a-day rodent burials. The second rocks the nuns as word arrives of the discovery of Sister Jenny’s bones, who disappeared in Thailand years before. She may have drowned or have been murdered. It sets off a bout of jealousy; Sister Bonaventure was Jenny’s friend but others have been in charge of what to do about a burial. The bones come back to the monastery via Helen Parry, an activist nun who is a world celebrity. She’s a bit like a cross between Greta Thunberg and Nurse Ratched, but she stimulates old memories in our narrator who was once a school mate. Seldom have I read a book that is so inwardly judgmental yet so calm.  

 

Misfires:

 

 

If I were a young gay or trans person, I’d probably love the latest T. J. Klune novel Somewhere Beyond the Sea ( 2025, 416 pages.) Klune writes fantasy novels in which the LGBTI + community takes center stage. My problem is that each of his books has the same story: the prejudice facing those of non-normative sexuality and how love overcomes adversity. Klune novels are easy reads and this is the fifth I’ve perused, but I think I’m done. This is a sequel to Klune’s heralded 2020 House in the Cerulean Sea, which could stand as a sort of Harry Potter for gay folks. This one takes us back to Marsyas Island where Linus Baker and his partner Arthur Parnassus run a home for troubled magical children: Lucifer, Chauncey (a blob), Talia (a bearded female gnome), Theodore (a wyvern) Phee (a sprite), Sal (a were-cat), and new resident David (a Yeti). Jeanine Rowley is the new head of the Department of Magical Youth (DICOMY) and wishes to close down the orphanage because the resident “children” are too “dangerous,” especially Satan’s son Lucifer. It is far too easy to figure out that each character is a stand-in for something else; Rowley represents the intolerant political right, Marsyas and environs are a sanctuary city, Lucy is a victim of labeling, Sal is so big that no one thinks he’s a kid, etc. Klune has already made most of these points in Book One, so he tries to hinge the book on property ownership and crown it with a syrupy wedding. It feels (and is) lightweight. 

 

 

 

If you asked me to identify my favorite living comedian, I’d pick Steven Wright. I love his surrealistic humor, his wry/dry delivery, the brevity of his stories, and his hilarious punchlines. As in music, often a performer is much sharper live than on a record.  Wright’s novel Harold (2024, 256 pages) is an example of this in comedy. Harold is an offbeat seven-year-old who might be high-functioning autistic. He’s clearly bright but experiences the sensation of birds flying into his head whenever he contemplates somethings and deposits Harold in surreal places. The book covers a single day of Harold’s school- and family-life. Harold, like his creator, takes us to some seriously odd places, but I seldom guffawed because what works on the stage didn’t translate on the page.

 

Rob Weir

 

The Red House: Can This Famiy Be Salvaged?

 

 

THE RED HOUSE (2012)

By Mark Haddon

Doubleday, 264 pages.

★★★★

 

You might recognize the name Mark Haddon as the author of the brilliant book and play The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The Red House is what he wrote next. It’s not quite the masterpiece of Dog in the Night-Time, but it’s an intriguing novel. Once again Haddon investigates both spoken and perceived thoughts.

 

The Red House follows the trials of an estranged brother and sister who reconnoiter at their mother’s funeral. Based on that sad gathering, eldest brother Richard, an upwardly mobile doctor rents a cottage in Herefordshire on the Welsh border near Hay-on-Wye. The idea is to repair family ties over the course of a week. Good luck with that, as the two families are like chalk and cheese. Richard, a divorcee, has recently remarried. Along with his sexy wife, Louisa, he inherits a stepdaughter, Melissa, a spoiled flirtatious 16 year-old. She’s like something out of Mean Girls.

 

Richard’s sister, Angela, is married to Dominic who has recently lost his job and has been reduced to a sales position at Waterstones (a British bookstore chain). His economic tumble reduces his family to downwardly mobile members of the upper lower class. Angela was once a looker, but after four births she’s on the chunky side, which is nothing compared to being seriously depressed since she lost a stillborn daughter 18 years earlier and can’t shake her blues. Their three living children are 17-year-old Alex, who is part good guy and part horny high schooler; Daisy, 16, who has fallen in with a fundamentalist Christian group; and adorable, but detached, eight-year-old Benji, who often disappears into fantasies and fantasy games.

 

Needless to say, the class divide comes into play, symbolized by the gap between Richard’s shiny Mercedes and Dominic’s old family clunker that he hopes will make it to Herefordshire. On a deeper level, Richard assumes a leadership role as he’s paying for the vacation, though he’s blind and deaf to Dominic’s feelings of inferiority. When the two attempt to bond over beer and outdoor grilling, Richard mainly sees Dominic as a “bloke,” which isn’t a good thing. Dominic thinks Richard is an ineffectual father to Melissa and he is. Melissa is as difficult as she can be, a vocal vegetarian, a foul-mouthed kid, selfish, and prone to doing whatever she wants whenever she wishes. In like fashion, though, everyone thinks Daisy has been brainwashed.

 

It is, nonetheless, a revelatory week. When push comes to shove, each of the characters becomes aware of which of their impulses sustains them and which are destructive. Richard, for example, discovers that he needs to build a relationship with Louisa rather than merely being bedazzled by her looks. The fact that Dominic seems to be flirting with Louisa is one reason, but he also realizes that having a mistress on the side means he can’t be fully in a relationship with his wife. That might seem obvious, but each character in his or her own way needs to learn to be more mature. Daisy has a sexuality crisis of faith and her mother begins to see her children for who they are rather than Karen, the lost child.

 

One of the triumphs of The Red House is Haddon’s skill in giving personalities to each of his eight major characters, no easy feat in a relatively short novel. To elaborate on the aforementioned use of spoken and perceived thoughts, most of the latter are as if we are inside mind bubbles that quite often illumine what they really think and feel rather than what they carefully say. (For Melissa, it’s the opposite!)

 

I will caution, though, that Haddon’s writing style requires some adjustment time. This is not a novel in which the author signposts who is talking or thinking. Haddon relies on his readers to get to know the characters until they can infer who is talking or contemplating. Benji is the easiest to translate. As precocious as he is, he still inhabits an eight-year old’s world, one that’s a mix of amusing imagination and verbalized fears. It will take you a bit longer with the adult characters, but because each metaphorically has a unique worldview, you’ll catch on. This is my way of saying don’t toss the book aside after 50 or so pages because you feel lost; you are actually feeling the way each character feels. You might even feel sorry for Melissa instead of wanting to slap her!

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

Queen Esther: Irving Recyles but Tells a Good Story

 

 

 

QUEEN ESTHER (2025)

By John Irving

Simon and Schuster, 432 pages.

★★★★

 

I was charitable when I reviewed The Last Chairlift in 2023. It was supposed to be the last novel from John Irving. That didn’t turn out to be the case, as late last year he released Queen Esther. It should have been everything I hate: a (semi-) sequel (of The Cider House Rules, 1985) and deals with shopworn themes such as wrestling (every novel since 1973’s 158-Pound Marriage);  small people (A Prayer for Owen Meany, 1985); a male raised by feminists (The World According to Garp, 1978); confused sexual identity (Garp, In One Person, 2012), a lost limb (1981’s The Fourth Hand), and Vienna (every novel since his first, Setting Free the Bears, 1968). Speaking of bears, they are about the only thing in Queen Esther that’s not been recycled (and that includes Irving's fixation on penises). And yet… Queen Esther has its virtues.

 

John Irving might not be an author who goes to great lengths to avoid repetition, nor is he a careful self-editor. (Queen Esther could use both a developmental editor and a veto-proof copy editor.) All of this said, when it comes to storytelling, Irving can plausibly be compared to Charles Dickens. (Dickens also needed editors.)

 

Concerning the book’s title, in the Old Testament, Esther was married to Xerxes, the king of Persia. She was Jewish, but hid her identity. When Mordecai failed to bow lowly enough to satisfy Haman, Xerxes’ top advisor, Haman sought to exterminate the Jews. Esther’s intervention saved them and is the background to the Jewish holiday of Purim.

 

You’re wrong if you think Irving is making a backdoor political statement; he goes through the front door! This novel has been praised in Jewish sources, both because Irving carefully researched Jewish culture and is respectful of Zionism. Through his characters, Zionism is a desire not to be assimilated or persecuted, as well as moral battle to maintain Jewish identity. (Is it a mere coincidence that Haman is just one letter off from being Hamas?)

 

In the novel, three-year-old Esther Nacht (born in 1905) loses both of her parents to anti-Semites. She is sent to St. Cloud, Maine, which fans of Cider House Rules will recognize as the site of an orphanage (and underground abortion clinic) run by Dr. Wilbur Larch. Larch is an ether addict, but a kindly man who quickly realizes Esther as more world- and book-wise than most adults. After settling in, Esther becomes a beloved resident of St. Cloud’s, though the Jewish identity that she embraces is a problem; there just aren’t many Jews in St. Cloud. Larch finally locates a New Hampshire family to adopt Esther when she’s 15. Tommy and Connie Winslow aren’t Jewish, but they despise anti-Semitism, and Esther comes to regard them as her parents and their three daughters as her sisters. When Honor, an unexpected fourth is born, Esther practically raises her. She and Honor eventually share another bond; Honor wants to be a mother but is scared of childbirth and Esther wants to experience pregnancy, but has zero interest in parenting. Thus, a wrestler impregnates Esther and the child, James is given to Honor to raise. As in Garp, “Jimmy” grows up in a houseful of dominant women.  

 

The bulk of the novel is devoted to Jimmy growing up in the 1960s. Esther and Honor persuade him to wrestle in the hope he will suffer an injury that will exempt him from the Vietnam War. He’s fine, but his interest in becoming fluent in German leads him to take his college JYA in Vienna, where he wrestles for exercise. There are two tough Russians who might be able to lame Jimmy, but they become friends rather than manglers. Plan two: If Jimmy can impregnate a woman he could secure a parentship exemption. This part of the novel is long on the ambiance of post-World War II Vienna. (Spoiler: It was gritty rather than elegant.) Jimmy wouldn’t mind losing his virginity to his beautiful tutor, Annaliese Eissler, but she has a more important mission to complete. His roomies in the tawdry boarding house are Claude, a French Jewish student, and Jolanda, a lesbian.

 

Jimmy, like his birth mother Esther, finds himself caught up in a world in which identity and history have imprinted his future. Add a few puppeteers pulling his strings and Jimmy is Garp version II. Some readers have complained that in Irving’s disjointed telling, Esther too often fades into the background. They’re not wrong!

 

Rob Weir