The Last Word by Hanif Kureishi

Published in Great Britain in 2014; published by Scribner on March 10, 2015

Witty observations about human nature are Hanif Kureishi's specialty. In The Last Word, he turns his attention to the dying craft of writing literature at a time when there are "more writers than readers. ... The only books people read were diet books, cookbooks, or exercise books. People didn't want to improve the world, they only wanted better bodies." There isn't much of a story in The Last Word, but Kureishi improves the world by adding a few laughs. While there is more wit than substance in The Last Word, I found the novel worth reading for its ample supply of amusing sentences.

Harry Johnson has been commissioned to write a biography of Mamoon Azam. Mamoon, one of the first dark-skinned Indians to make a splash in the literary world, is Rushdie-like in his stature and opinions. The publisher envisions a controversial biography with a "hot, moody photo" of Mamoon on the cover that will stimulate sales of his books -- "long family novels set in colonial India" -- which are critically acclaimed but mostly ignored by a general reading public that views them as too intellectual.

Mamoon's current wife, Liana Luccioni, insists that the biography must not damage Mamoon's reputation, exactly the opposite of the book Harry's publisher wants him to write. To an extent, The Last Word is a biting commentary on celebrity biographies, which dish dirt to titillate rather than illuminate. Contrary to Liana's belief that readers want "upliftment, to learn the path of greatness so they can follow down it," Harry's publisher believes that readers want icons to be trashed so they can consider themselves the icon's equal.

Mamoon, on the other hand, has no desire to be peeled "as you would an onion." Serious writers are out of fashion, says Mamoon. Now, "no sooner has someone been sodomized by a close relative than they think they can write a memoir." Although Harry believes readers will understand that "sexuality makes fools of everyone," Mamoon resists being made fashionable through the exposure of a past that (if the gossip is to be believed) was exciting and provocative if selfish and cruel. While Mamoon accuses biographers of envying the sex lives of the subjects they trash, he also denies that his life was filled with sexual escapades ("even Philip Larkin had more sex"). Mamoon does, however, appreciate the idea of biography as fiction, since fiction often yields truths that haphazard reality cannot so easily convey.

Although written as a comedy, The Last Word contains some serious thoughts. It is ultimately a novel about the meaning and making of art. Should art stand alone, divorced from its context or creator, freed from "banal and simplistic correlations" between art and the artist's experiences? Is art merely a seduction? To be taken seriously, must artists display passion by crossing boundaries that are denied to most of us? The notion of how love should fit into one's life provides a related theme (for what is love if not art?) that becomes more prominent toward the novel's end. The novel has broad elements of a love story but doesn't try to be one (or perhaps it tries and fails). The assessment of a life in the final years (art as the continuous rewriting of memory) also gives Kureishi a chance to express serious thoughts about reflection and atonement. Still, The Last Word is too fluffy to be regarded as a serious novel.

I suspect that many readers will dislike the novel because they dislike nearly every character but, in a comedy that exposes the weaknesses and foibles of the human spirit, likability seems unimportant. The Last Word is not a long novel but it suffers from a surprising amount of redundancy. Some of that results from seeing Mamoon through various eyes but some of it is repetition that serves no apparent end. To the extent that there is a plot involving Harry and the various women in his life, it's silly and insubstantial. To the extent that the plot focuses on a writer writing about a writer, the story's best moment is a clever plot twist near the end. The Last Word is not as profound as Kureishi wanted it to be, but it gave me enough chuckles to be satisfying.

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Soil by Jamie Kornegay

Published by Simon & Schuster on March 10, 2015

Jay Mize, a young soil scientist in Mississippi who is too aggressive in his advocacy of sustainable farming methods, loses his job with the local Farm Service Agency. Jay (mockingly known as "Compost Man") is a closet survivalist who believes he needs to make his family self-sustaining. An epiphany sends Jay chasing a dream of soil-free farming. Some people are better off not having epiphanies and Jay is one of them.

Shortly after his farmland floods and his wife, Sandy, returns to the city with their son, Jay finds a dead body in a newly formed lake that was once his field. Allowing paranoia to get the better of him -- paranoia that is perhaps inspired by the county's reaction to his notorious grandfather -- Jay decides that notifying Deputy Shoals, who came by two weeks earlier in search of a missing person, would be exactly the wrong thing to do.

Shoals is the novel's other key character. He is making it his mission to take every reasonably attractive female he meets to bed ... or, more likely, to the backseat of his Mustang. He would like to add Sandy to his list of conquests. Shoals, whose vigorous sex drive is combined with the maturity level of a twelve-year-old, adds comic relief to a novel that is often darkly humorous. Soil also derives a fair amount of humor from Jay's whacky doomsday theories -- "what if someone sets loose a fleet of self-replicating nanorobots?" -- the kinds of scenarios that hardcore survivalists secretly hope for so they can get some use out of their bug-out bags.

Most of the novel focuses on the consequences of Jay's unending supply of bad decisions. It is difficult to know whether Jay is stupid or noble in his unwillingness to accept defeat. Clearly he is a bit unhinged. Despite being a scientist, his life is an "equation without logic, or else the logic of nature, which he hardly understood." I imagine some readers will dislike Soil because they dislike Jay, who displays few admirable qualities. I found him to be a sympathetic character notwithstanding his insanely poor judgment and questionable mental health. Even Shoals is easy to understand and forgive, if not to admire. Neither of the central characters have a bad heart despite their bad behavior. It is, of course, easiest to sympathize with Sandy, who has to cope with Jay and Shoals while trying to do what's best for her son.

While I wouldn't classify Soil as a thriller, Jamie Kornegay creates an atmosphere of mild tension from beginning to end. The story moves quickly but Kornegay doesn't skimp on characterization. Even minor characters (most of whom belong in the deep woods where they live) are easy to visualize. I didn't quite buy the ending, which seems a bit too easy. In hindsight, I'm not sure I buy any of Jay's actions, but Kornegay convinced me of their reality as I was reading and that's all that matters. In the end, Kornegay tells an original and entertaining story in pleasing prose, which is more than most authors manage.

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The Alphabet House by Jussi Adler-Olsen

Published by Dutton on February 24, 2015

In a departure from the Department Q police procedurals that Jussi Alder-Olsen usually writes, The Alphabet House combines a war story with a modern crime thriller. At the same time, it does not fit within either genre. The Alphabet House is more a psychological novel, an in-depth exploration of two personalities. For the most part, I enjoyed reading it. I appreciated the thought that went into it. I admired the writing style. I just didn't buy it.

Bryan and James, a pilot British pilot and navigator, are shot down behind enemy lines. Fleeing from pursuers, they board a passing hospital train full of wounded SS officers. They assume the guise of unconscious patients in a car that is mysteriously crowded with comatose officers who do not appear to be wounded. They wind up in a hospital ward, known as the Alphabet House, where their survival depends upon passing themselves off as shell-shocked Nazi officers.

Bryan and James are not the only patients faking mental illness. A long stretch of the book deals with German malingerers who make trouble for James. Why they do so is never quite clear and, while this section of the book is not dull, I'm not sure its contribution to the story justifies the number of words that are devoted to it. The malingerers do add to the action in a tense scene at the end of Part One.

Part Two begins in 1972. Bryan is now a grumpy specialist in gastric diseases and sports medicine. The plot takes Bryan back to Germany in search of a past from which he has not fully recovered. His impersonation of an SS officer during the war comes back to haunt him.

The Alphabet House is interesting but not particularly exciting or emotionally engaging. Its length works against it. The book could easily have been condensed. Two guys lying in bed thinking "I hope we don't get caught" is less than thrilling even with an occasional break the monotony. Only the beginning and the end of Part One generate any tension. Part Two is better, particularly toward the end, but the actions of the German malingers (particularly in Part Two) almost always struck me as contrived, if not abysmally stupid. I just didn't buy the story that Adler-Olsen eventually got around to telling. The narrative drags on long after the climax and some of the last chapters add little of value. I did, however, like the way the story finally ends. The ending has the virtue of honesty.

The quality of Adler-Olsen's prose and the interesting characters he crafted kept me reading. Still, I formed no emotional connection with the characters, in part because I didn't buy into their reality (particularly James) any more than I believed the German malingerers were real. None of that stopped me from wondering what would happen next.

The story is not quite like anything else I've read, so Adler-Olsen scores points for originality. If this had been a shorter, tighter novel with characters who behaved in ways I could accept, I would give it a stronger recommendation. As it stands, I'm not sorry I read it, but I'm disappointed that it did not realize its potential to be an outstanding novel.

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The Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson

Published in Canada in 2003; published digitally by Open Road Media on January 27, 2015

Nalo Hopkinson is a Jamaican-born Canadian. Some aspects of The Salt Roads incorporate Carribean (particulalry Haitian) mythology. For that reason, The Salt Roads is marketed as a fantasy. Oddly enough, it would be a better novel without the fantasy elements.

The Salt Roads struck me as three separate novels welded together with bulging seams, never quite aligning into a well-constructed whole. Most of The Salt Roads takes place in the mid-nineteenth century. A large part follows slaves on a plantation in Saint-Domingue, the former French colony in the Caribbean. Another large part takes place in the same time frame in Paris. The smallest part takes place in fourth century Egypt. That part is told from the perspective of a Nubian-Greek slave known (among other names) as Meri. Much of the novel is quite strong but it too often adopts elements of mythology that I found distracting.

The best of the stories is the one set in Saint-Domingue. A fellow named Makandal is, depending upon one's perspective, a freedom-fighter or a troublemaker who wants to free slaves by murdering their masters, but the central character in Saint-Domingue is Mer, an aging woman who helps enslaved women give birth and uses traditional remedies to tend wounds and treat illnesses. Part of the story involves a love triangle as Mer and a man named Patrice both hope to bask in the light that radiates from a slave named Tipingee.

A less interesting story concerns a woman in Paris named Jeanne, a third generation whore who hopes that the poet Baudelaire will rescue her from her unfortunate life. The poet's mother, who controls the family's money, does not appreciate Jeanne's dark skin. This is Paris, so writers wander through the text, including Verne and Dumas. That seemed like name-dropping to me; little of it contributes to the story.

In the third plotline, Meri travels to Jerusalem with her gay slave friend. Meri's story in Egypt and Jerusalem provides a mildly interest contrast to the stories in Saint-Domingue and Paris but doesn't amount to much, even after we learn the role that Meri played in Catholic history.

A spirit that is initially hitchhiking within Jeanne's body occasionally narrates short sections of the novel. The opinionated spirit sometimes controls Jeanne's body, sometimes leaves the body entirely to roam free, sometimes travels back in time to inhabit Meri's body, sometimes talks to Mer, but mostly feels trapped, longing to be "liberated to dance forever" with other Africans. The spirit lives in a "flowing world of stories" and her apparent role is to tie the three stories together. I gather that the narrative voice belongs to one of many spirits collectively known as Ezili, the Haitian Vodou spirit of single motherhood (thank you, Google).

Salt -- in the sea, in sweat, as a spice, as the subject of parables, as a substance that weakens the force of magic -- is a symbol that seasons the novel. It is apparently intended as a symbol of defiance and resistance. Salt, we are told, forms the roads of power that will set slaves free.

The quality of Hopkinson's prose is excellent. Like most well-written stories of slavery, parts of The Salt Roads are heartbreaking. Other parts are just strange. Apart from the traveling spirit, the novel gives us talking birds and mermaids that convey messages and warnings. The mermaid is evidently Lasirèn, a mermaid of Haitian mythology (thanks again, Google). Makandal can transform into a bird or animal. He is possessed by Papa Ogu, the Haitian spirit father. I'm always a little rattled when realistic novels suddenly give way to pure fantasy. Using mythology to represent the unifying spirit of all women, the spirit that resists subjugation, is a nice idea but Hopkinson didn't make it work for me, perhaps because I suffer from a literary aversion to Voudu and mermaids. Fans of traditional fantasy may have a different reaction.

The Salt Roads gave me the sense that Hopkinson, overly ambitious, wrote three partial stories, didn't know how to finish any of them, so threw them together with a traveling spirit and called it a novel. Maybe that's harsh since I liked quite a bit of The Salt Roads, but I liked its best elements more than I liked the whole.

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The Stranger by Harlan Coben

Published by Dutton on March 24, 2015

Adam Price is living the dream. He has a wife and two sons and he earns a decent income. He is convinced that he would do everything in his power to keep his family safe and happy. But the dream gives way to reality when a stranger tells Adam that his wife faked her pregnancy and miscarriage to keep him from leaving. The stranger provides evidence of that contention and then suggests, while admitting that he's only speculating, that Adam might want to do a DNA test to be sure that he's really the father of his sons.

The stranger's next encounters are with Heidi Dann, who learns something unpleasant about a family member, and Michaela Siegel, who learns the truth about an incident that had a serious impact upon her young life. Why the stranger drops bombshells on people and how he learns their secrets remain a mystery through much of the novel. What seems like a fairly straightforward crime in the novel's first half becomes more complex as the second half of the story begins to unfold.

Saying much more about the plot would be a crime in itself, so I won't. The novel's background details, ranging from female bodybuilding competition to Adam's attempt to prevent the city from seizing a client's home are just as interesting as the main story. I wasn't entirely convinced by the stranger's motivation for messing with people's lives, but the world is full of people who are motivated by odd beliefs so it was easy to set those doubts aside.

The ending comes as something of an anti-climax, in part because the reveal of the main bad guy is fairly obvious and in part because the actions of a supporting character at the end of the novel struck me as unlikely. Despite a mildly disappointing ending, I enjoyed reading The Stranger. The pace is brisk, the characters are likable, and my interest in the plot never abated.

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