Tom Barbash, _The Dakota Winters_

 IT'S 1980, AND young Anton Winters, after an early exit from the Peace Corps due to a bout with malaria, is back in New York City...in the Dakota, in fact. 

His father, Buddy, was the host of a much-admired talk show (there were such things in the 1970s, e.g., Dick Cavett's), but inexplicably walked off the show one day and traveled about for a year or so to find himself. 

Now Buddy is hoping for a comeback, but the television industry is skeptical, reluctant to give him another chance. Who's to say he won't crack up again? He asks for Anton's help in putting a new show together.

It may be only because I teach it so often, but this seemed like Hamlet to me. The father returns from the dead (literally in Hamlet's case, figuratively in Anton's) with a request. The request is no small one; it will require the son to put his own life on hold and devote himself to furthering his father's interests. How can the son say no? At the same time, how can this go other than badly?

Since it is 1980, another resident of the Dakota is planning his own resurrection from the dead. Anton thus also plays a small role in John Lennon's re-emergence, as a crew member on John's sailing voyage to the Bermudas, during which he wrote much of his comeback Double Fantasy album, released shortly before he was murdered. Barbash presents a credible portrait of Lennon, but I did not feel that it added a lot to the novel. Ditto the accumulation of period detail--Barbash can't compete with City on Fire or Fortress of Solitude on this front. 

But the the story of the Winters, father and son, I think will be sticking with me.

Sarah Moss, _Summerwater_

 I HAD NEVER heard of Sarah Moss until I saw a good review of this in...I think it was LRB. Probably. In any case, my city library had a copy, so I gave it a shot, and it's good. 

Quite short, under 200 pages, but feels well-rounded. The book is set during the course of a single day at a lake in Scotland surrounded by vacation rentals. Each chapter gives the point of view of one or another person who happens to be staying in one of the cabins (cottages?) this particular week, with short inter-chapters devoted to the description of the lake.

The close-third-person/free indirect style of the chapters present a range of characters who vary in age and circumstances, so on one level we have a Winesburg, Ohio sort of novel. At the same time, almost everyone is feeling provoked by the eastern European vacationers in one of the cabins, who are playing loud music late into the night, so on another level we seem to have a Brexit allegory.

You don't need to be too canny to divine that the last chapter will turn on a confrontation between the British vacationers and the people variously imagined by the other characters as Polish, Romanian, or Ukrainian...and sure enough, that's what happens. It does not go down at all the way I was expecting.

Renee Gladman, _Houses of Ravicka_

 I MISUNDERSTOOD THE sequence of the Ravicka books and so read this one, the fourth, right after reading the first (Event Factory), skipping the second and third, but I ended by enjoying it even more than I did the first, so I suppose no harm was done. I certainly intend to get to the second and third when I can.

Houses in Ravicka have...hmm, what to call them, spiritual partner houses? That is, for every house there is another house to which it corresponds, in some mysterious, never made explicit way. The Comptroller, our narrator for most of Houses of Ravicka, is embarrassed to mortification by his, or her (the Comptroller's gender sometimes switches) inability to locate Number 32, the partner of Number 96. The Comptroller is an i-dotting, t-crossing sort of person, a minder of p's and q's, the author of Regulating the Book of Regulations, and her/his bureaucratic discomfiture was both easy to sympathize with and entertaining.

The beauty of these books, for me, is their ability to hybridize the sci-fi-as-anthropology world-building of Delany or LeGuin with the intoxicating indeterminacy of Beckett or Lispector. Even though the last part of the novel is narrated by the person in 32, we never learn why or how the house became imperceptible to the Comptroller, just as we never quite settle on the Comptroller's gender identity. That seems exactly as it should be--the reward of the novel is not in the resolving of mysteries but in sentences like this one: 

Seeing my coordinate for the first time and knowing it was my coordinate was like being in two separate novels--at the beginning of one, the end of the other--and having those two novels write toward one another but as if with an obstacle between them, such as a massive eruption in the landscape that you must walk around in order to progress, and it'll take decades to do this.