Fox Creek by William Kent Krueger

Published by ‎ Atria Books on August 23, 2022

The theft of natural resources from Native people is the dominant theme of Fox Creek, but much of the story is a suspenseful wilderness adventure. The novel is the latest in the long-running Cork O’Connor series.

Cork is flipping burgers at his northern Minnesota restaurant, trying to live a peaceful life but still helping people with private investigations. A man who identifies himself as Louis Morriseau asks Cork to help him find his missing wife. Morriseau suspects that Dolores is fooling around with Henry Meloux. Morriseau clearly doesn’t understand that Henry is literally one hundred years old. And while he’s still energetic and might indeed have lead in his aging pencil, Henry is a medicine man and spiritual guide who is more interested in healing people than shagging them.

Cork’s wife Rainy is related to Henry. It doesn’t take Cork long to find Dolores, who has come to Henry is search of guidance. Nor does it take Cork long to learn that the man who contacted him is not Lou Morriseau. It is Lou (the real one) who has gone missing. Lou is a real estate lawyer who has been spending time in Canada for reasons that he hasn’t explained to Dolores.

Cork eventually makes it his mission to help Dolores. He’s joined in that effort by his son Stephen, Rainy, Henry, Lou’s brother Anton and his sister Belle, and various Natives who rally to the cause when needed.

Lou’s disappearance apparently has something to do with a hand-drawn map that bears the word KILLCATIE. Stephen and Belle are tasked with digging into that cryptic clue. The wilderness adventure begins when Henry and Rainy disappear with Dolores. Henry is an unparalleled woodsman, but he’s pursued by a Native tracker of nearly equal skill named LeLoup, who is accompanied by a couple of less skilled killers. As LeLoup tracks Henry’s group, Cork tracks LeLoup.

The story offers a satisfying resolution to the mystery of KILLCATIE, a mystery based on the credible premise that white people are again trying to enrich themselves by depriving Natives of resources. The wilderness adventure is enhanced by vivid descriptions of the Boundary Waters and the perils of staying alive in snowy woods, even when trackers aren’t pursuing with rifles.

The adventure turns into an interesting spiritual journey for some of its participants, although it affects them in different ways. That journey could have been hokey, but William Kent Krueger makes it seem authentic. Krueger is too respectful of Native people to leave the impression that he’s using Native beliefs as a prop. The story ends on a note of hope, in the sense that it suggests that it is never too late to set a life on its correct path. This is always an interesting series, and Fox Creek lives up to Krueger’s high standard.

RRECOMMENDED

Mount Chicago by Adam Levin

Published by Doubleday on August 9, 2022

Mount Chicago is a wild novel, spinning off in so many directions that it often seems on the verge of spinning out of control. The novel is at times infuriating, but mostly in a good way — in a way that amuses and entertains. One of the three significant characters, a parrot named Gogol, adds a playful element to a story that is already goofy. Gogol’s musings about freedom and dependence might be meant to illuminate human experiences of similar conditions, parrot logic being no less tenuous than human logic. Perhaps the parrot’s thoughts are intended to spotlight his owner’s emotional state as deduced from the impact those feelings have on Gogol. Maybe it is best to think of Gogol as a neurotic but philosophical character who indulges in the same fruitless search for meaning and contentment as humans but with a greater emphasis on preening.

The novel is set in Chicago, where a sinkhole destroyed Millennium Park and a wing of the Art Institute. The mayor prefers the term terrestrial anomaly to sinkhole because who wants to live in a city that is developing sinkholes? A dense cone arose in the middle of the sinkhole, apparently made from the remains of everything that was destroyed, including a significant number of tourists. The mayor decides to name the cone Mount Chicago and to surround it with a memorial to those who died, like (in the mayor’s words) Auschwitz but less depressing. Then the mayor decides there should be a Wall of Survivors, broadly defining survivors as everyone in Chicago who didn’t die, and perhaps newborn children who were affected by their parents’ emotional trauma while still in the womb.

Gogol’s owner, Solomon Gladman, is the second primary character. The third is Apter Schutz. Apter becomes obsessed with Gladman after discovering videos of his rare comedy club performances. Gladman was a psychotherapist before he became a successful novelist and occasional comedian. Learning more about Gladman motivates Apter to study social work (an education that gives Adam Levin the opportunity to explain and critique various forms of therapy). Apter made a significant amount of money by developing a product that took advantage of witless Trump supporters, then worked as a psychotherapist (a gig that made him adept at manipulating others) before accepting a position with Chicago’s mayor. That job that puts him in charge of a music festival to raise funds for the memorial. Perry Farrell, who is donating the services of Jane’s Addiction to the festival, would like to have Gladman perform. The mayor isn’t sure that’s a good idea, since he’s heard that Gladman’s humor is antisemitic. Gladman isn’t sure it’s a good idea for reasons of his own, but the invitation gives Apter a chance to meet the man he has always idolized.

The story leads to a climax involving a key character who was devastated by the death of people close to him who did not survive the sinkhole. The plot follows a winding path, a path made of detours and digressions, before arriving at the climax. Dozens of additional pages cause the story to fizzle out after the climax. The novel’s value lies in its journey rather than its mildly disappointing destination. A shortcake baked into the shape of the letter e becomes the focal point of a retelling of Gogol’s “The Overcoat.” David Mamet explains to Chicago’s mayor, back when he was an alderman, why the alderman is a jagoff. Gladman invents a longish fable about a future Chicago ruled by penguins who lead beavers that enslave ducks and a penguin king who is embarrassed by the boners his grandson (an adopted duck) can’t control. All of this is quite funny even if it is entirely unnecessary to the plot, which unfolds over a small percentage of the book’s word count.

Still, there are times during Mount Chicago when I thought Levin was a little too in love with his own humor, times when jokes or funny stories or amusing anecdotes lost some of their edge because they extended several pages beyond the point at which a punch line or climax would have been welcome. Some of the humor is too obvious to be effective. Levin mocks political correctness early in the novel, sometimes making a good point — the misuse of the word “survivor” to describe anyone who had an unpleasant experience, the mischaracterization of language the listener doesn’t appreciate as “violent” — but he does so selectively, making clear that he believes some groups are mockable and others, although just as egregious in their extremism, are not.

Levin occasionally uses the postmodern technique of speaking directly to the reader, reminding the reader that the book, after all, is just a work of fiction, not a true story. Since I like getting lost in books, imagining the stories to be true for as long as the illusion can be maintained, I’m not a big fan of the technique. After beginning the novel with an introduction that insists Levin should not be confused with any of the characters, Levin takes a break from the loose plot at roughly the one-third point to bring the reader up to speed on events that have transpired in his real life since he began writing the novel. Later in the book he discusses alternative ways in which the story might have unfolded. Okay, you’re postmodern, we get it.

These are not necessarily consequential gripes about a book that scores points for consistently provoking chuckles and an occasional belly laugh. Levin may have intended the novel as a serious exploration of grief, but it is too unfocused to be taken seriously (although it does make the point that we each grieve in our own ways). Even if the whole is less than the sum of its parts, I appreciated the novel as a celebration of storytelling. Gladman’s stories, whether presented in the form of fables or standup bits, and Apter's stories about the five significant events in his life, grab the reader’s attention, even when they extend beyond a reasonable stopping point. Whatever Levin’s intent might have been, the result is an absurdist comedy fest that merits a recommendation — and almost a strong recommendation — for the stories within the story.

RECOMMENDED

A History of Present Illness by Anna DeForest

Published by Little, Brown and Company on August 16, 2022

A History of Present Illness is sort of an Inside Baseball of medicine as practiced in hospitals. The narrator is a medical student. Much of the novel is bleak, from references to unfortunate moments in medical science (the Tuskegee experiment; inducing terror in children to study its effects) to descriptions of patients who suffer from physical and mental illnesses doctors can’t cure and who, perhaps for that reason, the doctors don’t care about.

Each chapter heading — “Modified Drama,” “Withdrawal of Care” — suggests a short story, but the chapters are linked by a patient named Ada. The novel has no clearly identifiable plot unless the random thoughts and anxieties of a medical student as she learns about anatomy and patient care in a hospital constitute a plot.

Toward the story’s end, the narrator shares her biographical details. Her life has been messy, complete with victimization by at least one of her stepfathers, self-mutilation, and a 72-hour mental health hold. At least the narrator managed to avoid the fate of a sister who was shipped to an evangelical camp in the South to have the devil beaten out of her.

In the present, the narrator has no time for romance or sex, although it seems unlikely that she would have success in those endeavors even if she were not busy with medical school. She appears to be learning about love voyeuristically, soaking up the experiences of others as she wonders whether they would be a good fit if she tried them on. She wonders about doctors who are emotionally detached from their patients (as doctors must be to make sound professional judgments). Perhaps her own empathy renders her unfit for the profession. Perhaps it is her questionable mental health that renders her unfit. Or maybe she’ll be a good doctor one day. Who knows?

Putting aside biographical detail, all that remains is a series of observations about what the narrator has learned or seen or done as a medical student. She wants to die screaming rather than being the silent victim of a heart attack, a preference that seems a bit dramatic. She wonders about students who view medicine as a vehicle to a large income rather than a calling. She tells the reader that she wants to understand suffering, although her personal experience should give her a bank of relevant experience to draw upon. She feels jealous of students and patients who can take comfort from religion, although she appreciates the solitude of the hospital chapel. She ends the novel with advice she was given: “Don’t worry about your weaknesses. Just take your strengths and play them to death.” Seems like good advice for poker. I'm not sure how well it translates to living.

The narrator keeps the reader apprised of Ada’s condition (a disease causes dementia before it renders her comatose). The most powerful scenes follow the narrator’s interaction with Ada’s husband when Ada (after a gruesome procedure from which her husband is spared) is finally declared dead and removed from her ventilator. The bureaucratic, mistake-ridden process of making Ada officially dead confirms the narrator’s observation that nobody in the hospital dies until a doctor allows it. Ada wrestles with the degree to which she should be honest with Ada's husband. That struggle creates more sympathy for Ada than her vague and detached description of her childhood.

Apart from the scenes surrounding Ada's death, Anna DeForest gives us a volume of smooth prose and some interesting medical trivial but never captures the reader's imagination. The autobiographical details seem self-indulgent. Some of book is a bit dull. But other parts of the book have merit, earning a very guarded recommendation.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes

Published by Knopf on August 16, 2022

Elizabeth Finch could be read as a celebration of intellect. That, at least, is my less than intellectual impression of the novel. The central theme of the unconventional narrative concerns ideas — following an idea, exploring it, evaluating it, and drawing conclusions about the idea’s merit. The novel takes a close look at several ideas that relate to the meaning of life. To some extent, the novel might also be seen as the celebration of teachers, or of the rare teacher who opens the minds of students rather than stuffing minds full of facts that might or might not be accurate.

The story is told in three parts. Elizabeth Finch is the glue that binds them. When the story opens, EF is teaching a course in Culture and Civilization at the University of London. The course touches upon monoculture and foundation myths, the deception of histories that cultures embrace as “comforting bedtime stories.” EF deals in “truths not from previous generations but from previous eras, truths she kept alive but which others had abandoned.” Students like Neil and Anna find their lives transformed.

EF challenges her students, poses questions and critiques answers without moral judgment or derision. EF does not teach in the traditional way — dates, names, facts, “all leading to broader ideas.” She begins with the broad ideas, and then illustrates them with dates, names, and facts. Students who are unsettled by ideas, who are unwilling to rethink their own ideas, who just want to memorize facts and dates so they can pass exams, drop her class or become confrontational. One of the confrontational students, Geoff, provides a different perspective on EF at the novel’s end. Which view of EF is correct (or maybe both or neither) is left for the reader to decide.

In any event, we learn in part three that EF published a piece after she retired that caused the tabloids to paint her as a heretic, anti-Christian, and a disciple of Hitler. Geoff may have been the instigator of that attack. EF was reclusive before the tabloids attacked her and stopped publishing after, but she never published much anyway, apparently preferring solitude and a life of the mind to sharing with others. As with so much else in her life, it may be that she just didn’t want to be bothered.

EF is an enigma. She is sympathetic but distant. She answers questions with candor and concealment. She speaks of love as bringing clarity and delirium. She resists having labels stuck to her because she is “not a steamer trunk.” Apart from these contradictions, we learn very little about EF because the novel’s narrator, Neil, never uncovers her secrets.

If we can be sure about anything, it is that EF is is a stoic who believes that freedom lies in controlling what you can and accepting the things you cannot. We might be able to control what we think or feel but we cannot control how others will behave in a relationship. EF once cautioned her students that passion, like reason, “may mislead us furiously.” Neil once glimpsed a man who might have been important to EF, his best clue that passion might have influenced her life, but he struggles to learn more.

Neil views EF as a romantic pessimist and then as a romantic stoic. EF tells Anna that love is the only thing that matters. Yet EF believes that love, for a woman, has always meant “possession followed by sacrifice” — being possessed and then being sacrificed. She knows that people will look at her and say she never married, “a reductive way to describe and contain a life.” EF is solitary but not lonely because solitude is strength and loneliness is weakness. EF abhors weakness and will never be possessed.

After Neil is no longer EF’s student, he begins meeting her for lunch two or three times a year. They continue their meetings for twenty years, through two of Neil’s failed marriages. The lunches always begin with EF asking, “What have you got for me?” They spend the lunch discussing ideas, often ideas that EF touched upon in her class. EF never talks about herself because, to EF, ideas are the things that matter. Everything else, including the food served at lunch, is likely to be disappointing.

The novel’s second part is an essay. Neil writes it in response to an implied challenge, a way to prove something to EF despite his knowledge that EF will never read it. The essay is astonishing. It explores Julian the Apostate, “the last pagan emperor of Rome,” whose death made possible the rise of Christianity (or at least that’s how Christian history tells the story). The essay recounts the deeds and words of Julian, imagines how history might have unfolded if he had lived (perhaps the Age of Reason would not have been delayed by fourteen centuries), and examines how thinkers and poets through the ages viewed Julian, including Montaigne, Milton, Voltaire, Gibbon, Goethe, Byron, and Swinburne. This is heavy thought, but the essay is lively, never stuffy or dense. This is how history and philosophy should be written, with all the rigor but none of the drudgery of scholarship.

The third part reconnects Neil and Anna (and Geoff by email) as Neil continues his quest to understand EF. EF’s brother, who could not be less like her, contributes his limited perspective. Neil and Anna both admire (and even love) EF but in different ways, while Goeff thinks she’s a bit of a fraud. Yet as EF made clear, none of us can really understand another person. Our best hope is to understand something of ourselves, a hope that comes from taking control of those things that we can control about our lives and stoically accepting the things we cannot. That’s probably the novel’s great lesson (giving intellectual force to the AA serenity prayer), although the book overflows with lessons.

I have never read a novel like Elizabeth Finch, a novel that is largely devoted to an essay about history, religion, and philosophy, a novel in which thought supplants action or characterization. We learn only superficial details about Neil and his failed marriages because Neil isn’t important. We learn almost nothing about Anna. None of the characters, not even EF, are as important as ideas. Yet the essay is so brilliant and the unknowable character of EF so fascinating that the novel’s unconventional nature, its refusal to give the reader a plot or detailed characterizations, becomes a virtue. This isn’t a novel for every reader, but it may be a novel that would reward every reader who gives it a fair chance.

RECOMMENDED

Bark to the Future by Spencer Quinn

Published by Forge Books on August 9, 2022

I knocked Spencer Quinn a bit for his last Chet and Bernie novel because I thought he was recycling thoughts that, while amusing, Chet had shared in other novels. For those who aren’t familiar with the series, Chet is a dog. Chet narrates his adventures with his owner/partner, Bernie Little. The thoughts Quinn attributes to Chet are spot on, at least from the standpoint of humans who try to imagine what dogs think. I am happy to report that Quinn did not fish in the same pond of jokes when he wrote Bark to the Future — or if he did, he caught some new ones and threw most of the old ones back.

Bernie Little was a star pitcher in high school. Now he’s a private detective. He’s driving with Chet in his latest Porsche when he spots Rocket Saluka at a freeway exit. Rocket is a former teammate, now homeless and mentally unsound. Bernie’s attempt to help Rocket leads to a mystery that has its roots in high school. The mystery involves a switchblade that, for a time, was in Rocket’s possession. Before that, it was kept locked up by a chemistry teacher, only to be stolen.

When Rocket goes missing, Bernie follows a trail that takes him to a divorced woman he took the prom when they were in high school, the ex-husband of the woman’s deceased sister, a pastor, the chemistry teacher, the teacher’s advanced chem students, the school janitor, a prisoner, and a diving instructor. The investigation eventually gives birth to a murder mystery.

Chet keeps the action moving by chasing suspects, swimming to recover evidence, and sniffing under the table for any crumbs that might have been dropped. The plot is light-hearted and entertaining. Bernie has his moments but Chet is always the star in these novels. Apart from thinking dog thoughts and making fleeting efforts to understand the strange behavior of humans when they aren’t petting him, Chet contributes to the story by noticing things (typically scents or glimpses of people) that the reader will recognize as clues even if Chet does not. Bernie is typically clueless until he finally pieces things together. Chet doesn’t always understand the details of the plot he narrates, but he is confident that all will be well because Bernie is the smartest, strongest, kindest, and all-around best human on the planet, an opinion that is reinforced by treats and cheeseburgers.

Bernie’s rocky love life has evolved over the series, although he seems settled in with Weatherly. Chet’s love life may have produced a dog that Weatherly adopted, a dog that looks suspiciously like Chet, a dog Chet considers the most annoying dog on the planet because how could there possibly be another Chet? Spencer Quinn is back in form with Bark to the Future, making this an easy novel to recommend to dog lovers. This would be a good starting point for fans who are new to the series.

RECOMMENDED