Surely, the shortcomings are mine. These four books have variously claimed the most esteemed awards and been acclaimed by no less towering literary grandèes than Oprah and Barack. Yet I just could not award the mandatory five stars that everyone else showered upon them. True, I tend to be stingy with awarding five stars but I honestly could spare a four-star review to only one of these reads. The others are on my three-star shelf, a rather sorry distinction indeed. You should probably go with Oprah's reviews, not mine.
Let's look at them from least to best...
Trust: A Novel by Hernan Diaz
Kindle, 415 pages
Published 2022
Oprah lauded this book as "fun as hell to read"and it was one of Barack Obama's favorite books of 2022. I found it sterile, gimmicky and forgettable and most definitely not "luminous" as it was deemed by The New Yorker. So clearly I am the philistine here. Because this book also won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
The setting is Gilded Age Wall Street and the subject is finance and all the sins, mortal and venial, it unleashes. And all that money cannot improve the peculiarities of those who wield it - the characters are really just stick figure representations of sadness, greed and moral failure. The book is cleverly and curiously formatted and perhaps you will like the confusion that bestows upon the reader. It's at least more interesting than the story. Not recommended, at least not by me.
Amsterdam: A Novel by Ian McEwan
Audiobook narrated by Steven Crossley
4 hours 41 minutes, 210 pages
Published 1998
We were planning our recent trip to Europe and first visit to Amsterdam so hey, I thought, this title is a slam dunk. Except it turns out it is not at all about Amsterdam, which simply figures as a backdrop at the end. It is about a small group of elite, possibly over-educated and definitely over-indulged Brits for whom life just seems like too much trouble to bother.
The writing is mordant, arch and excellent, the pace never lags. McEwan is gifted and very comfortable with his characters, all of whom are probably drawn from the company he keeps in his orbit of social brilliance. One arc I particularly liked traced a character's creative process while writing a symphony.
But my God, this plot. Is McEwan just finding a new way to tell us how hopeless and vile the human race really is? Perhaps that gleeful accomplishment is why this book was awarded the 1998 Booker prize. I can't share examples with you because they would be spoilers so you'll have to read it yourself and decide whether you agree with the Booker awards or with me - I gave it three stars, and am still sulking about the bait and switch promise of the title.
The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner
Audiobook read by Edward Herrmann
7 hours 52 minutes, 214 pages
Published 1976
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This was a re-read and I embarked upon it wondering whether my ambivalent opinion the first time around would change. I adore Stegner's Angle of Repose and The Big Rock Candy Mountain. They are immense literary achievements. And one would think this is, also, given that it won the 1977 National Book Award for Fiction.
But alas, I fear that Stegner succeeded too well at making his aging, curmudgeonly protaganist an unlikeable old coot. Joe Alston, a retired literary agent self-exiled to what is not named but likely Palo Alto, is looking grousingly back over his life plagued by the ailments of regret and rheumatoid arthritis.
At one point he asks "If you examine a life...do you really examine the life or do you examine the shadows it casts in other lives?" And he then proceeds to examine those shadows, prominent among which is he and wife Ruth's acquaintance with the aristocratic Astrid during a 1950's sojourn in Denmark. If this book were wine, I would declare it "drinkable", which is not the same as "fine". Like McEwan, Stegner is a consummate writer and therefore always worth reading, but this opus does not rank up there with his best work.
The Covenant of Water: A Novel by Abraham Verghese
Audiobook, read by the author
31 hours 16 minutes, 736 pages
Published 2023
This is a sprawling epic of a book, akin, perhaps to One Hundred Years of Solitude in the way it shimmers -except that it is set not in Colombia but in Kerala, India. The lives of the characters are extraordinarily ordinary and the book reads almost like a processional as their fates are revealed.
Verghese is a physician and various medical conditions figure prominently in the plot, as do the murky, surging waters of the Malabar Coast. Verghese has a gentler view of humans than Diaz, McEwan and Stegner, perhaps simply because he is less of a humanist. A quote from a minor character, "Faith is to know the pattern is there, even though none is visible", is perhaps given us as a guide for the unfolding of Verghese's story, which spans the decades from 1900-1977.
Oprah enthused that it was "unputdownable" and one of the best books she'd read in her entire life. Verghese was awarded the 2023 Writer in the World Prize for the book. Perhaps it is my devotion to Verghese's first novel Cutting for Stone that prevents me from casting accolades upon this one. Cutting for Stone was absolutely a five star novel; for me this was shy at least one star from that. Still, an amazing achievement to weave all the threads of this sometimes improbable plot to its culmination. As another minor character observes, "Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!"
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