The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid: A review

Mohsin Hamid really needs to go to punctuation school. His sentences in this book run on forever, for a full paragraph in some cases. Very long paragraphs. I previously read his book Exit West and I don't remember that being a problem with that one, so I assume that he made a conscious choice to write this book in this manner. I can't speak for other readers but I just found it distracting and annoying.

The story is briefly summarized in the very first sentence: “One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.” At some time and place that are never fully identified, people start changing color. At least White people start changing color. We see this through the eyes of the protagonist, Anders, a White man who wakes up one morning to discover that his skin is turning dark. He talks to his lover, Oona, about it, and soon learns that this is happening to others as well. This creates an unsettled atmosphere and some people seek to resist the change, but how?

Predictably, when people are faced with something they don't understand with all the shock and fear that result, conspiracy theories abound and this creates even more shock and fear and resultant violence and doomsaying. And yet, life goes on. People are born and they live and die.

We meet Anders' father and Oona's mother. Anders' father is a widower dying of cancer. Oona's mother is a widow in mourning for the loss of her son, Oona's brother. She is easy prey for conspiracy theorists. She just soaks it all in. She was, in fact, one of the most interesting characters in the book for me. She sees herself and the people she comes from as "the only people who could not call themselves a people in this country, and there are not so many of them left." She feels they are on their way to becoming extinct.

Long ago, I read Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. I've seen this book compared to that one. In fact, some reviewers have referred to it as a reimagining of that classic. Those comparisons are apt, although in this case, instead of turning into a giant insect, the protagonist and many others remain human but change colors. But in a world where skin color still defines an individual in the minds of many people, perhaps the change from white to dark is not unlike being changed into a bug that is vulnerable to being squashed.

This was an interesting idea for a book and it was generally well-written except for my caveat about the run-on sentences. That was just extremely annoying to me and hindered my enjoyment of the book. Moreover, I know that my sainted English teacher, Mrs. Rubenstein, would not be amused, and I thank you, dear Mrs. Rubenstein, for teaching me better.   

Phantom Prey by John Sandford: A review

I've read a few of the books in this series, four I think prior to this one, but it's been a while since I read one and I didn't have a real firm grasp of the Lucas Davenport story. I remembered that he was from Minnesota and that he was a detective in a crime detection state agency there. And that was about it. So I came to Phantom Prey with no particular pre-conceived expectations.

In this one, Alyssa, a woman friend of Weather, Davenport's wife, arrives home to find that her home security system had been disarmed and there are bloodstains on the wall of her kitchen. She expected her daughter, Frances, and her housekeeper, Helen, to be there, but the house is empty. There's no clue where the two have gone or where they might be. The housekeeper does finally show up but Frances remains missing.

The other thing is that there was a lot of blood in the kitchen and testing reveals that it is Frances' type. The case becomes a missing person investigation but there is an underlying belief that she is probably dead. The police seem to be making no progress on the case, so Alyssa contacts her friend Weather and requests that she ask her husband to get involved in the investigation. Lucas doesn't have much on his plate at the moment and probably welcomes the distraction of a hot case.

The action of the book is set in the early 2000s and Lucas learns that Frances was heavily into the Goth scene in the Twin Cities which was apparently very active at that time. He's only just begun his investigation when two of the Goths who were a part of Frances' circle of friends are murdered. This, of course, increases fears that if she is not already dead she may soon be and adds an extra element of urgency to Davenport's inquiries.  

I seem to remember that the other books in the Davenport series that I have read featured a good bit of humor and that was the case with this one as well. This was the eighteenth in the series so Sandford obviously had his formula well established by the time the book was published in 2008. There are now a surprising thirty-two books in this series, plus the writer has at least a couple of other series going all of which simply boggles my mind. How does a writer come up with that many different ideas? I guess that the answer may be that they are not "different" ideas; they are simply a new set of characters and situations set within that same formula and all the writer has to do is fill in the blanks. Sounds easy, doesn't it? But it probably isn't. 

The Necklace by Matt Witten: A review

 

I finished reading this book more than two weeks ago (Yes, I am seriously behind with my reviews!), and when I sat down to write a review today, I could not remember anything about it. You might conclude from that that it didn't make much of an impression on me and you would be right in that assumption. 

Not that it was a terrible book. That would have made an impression and I probably would have remembered it, but it was just kind of blah. Not really terrible and not really that good. 

The writing was okay. Matt Witten is mostly a writer for television and has had considerable success with that. He has also written other mystery novels, but this is the first one of his that I have read. In the end, I resorted to the summary of it on Goodreads to refresh my memory.

One of the problems that I had with the book was that I just didn't like the protagonist that much. She should have evoked my sympathy. After all, her young daughter had been murdered twenty years before. A man had been arrested and charged with the murder. He was tried and convicted and when we come in on the story he is about to be put to death by the state of North Dakota. Our protagonist, the child's mother Susan Lentigo, is driving to North Dakota to witness the execution. She lives in upstate New York so has a long drive ahead.

On the way, she encounters her ex-husband. Their marriage broke apart after the murder of their daughter and her ex is now remarried and has another young daughter. 

Not to disclose any spoilers, I will just say that Susan discovers something on her long trip that leads her to believe that the man who is about to be put to death is actually innocent and that someone else who is still free is, in fact, the murderer. She tries to get the FBI to listen to her and investigate, but they are having none of it. 

Finally, she manages to reach the retired cop who made the original arrest and gets him to listen to her story and her reasoning. With his help and the help of a cynical but smart teenage girl, she races to try to find the proof that will win a stay of the execution and put the real murderer behind bars. 

Susan is a very unself-aware character who is quick to blame everyone but herself. Her conversation relies heavily on profanity and while that doesn't normally bother me - I have been known to use profanity myself - it just felt stilted in this instance. I could not feel any real connection to this character even though her life story should have elicited my sympathy. All in all, it was a relief to turn the last page of the book and move on to something else.

My rating: 2 of 5 stars