In honor of McMurtry’s recent passing, I decided to read a novel of his I’d never read before. This picaresque novel follows the shenanigans of young novelist Danny Deck, who lives in Houston and has sold a novel as well as screenplay rights to it for a pile of cash, while weaseling his way into the hearts and pants of several women in his life. When he impetuously marries Sally, a woman he met while sleeping on the floor of a friend’s house after a party, the couple escapes to San Francisco—where their marriage falls apart—and we readers follow Danny from one bad decision to the next, eventually leading him back to Houston.

McMurtry has a gift for turning a phrase, particularly when describing a place he loves. For example, he writes, “Houston was my companion on the walk. She had been my mistress, but after a thousand nights together, just the two of us, we were calling it off. It was a warm, moist, mushy, smelly night, the way her best nights were. The things most people hated about her were the things I loved: her heat, her dampness, her sumpy smells. She wasn’t beautiful, but neither was I.” But this book also finds McMurtry laying down some lazy passages, too, with annoying alliteration like this. “Leon actually has to affect affectations” and “the puppet of remote but very powerful powers.” He does this often throughout the novel and it is very distracting.

Valentine is the debut novel from acclaimed author Elizabeth Wetmore. An instant New York Times Bestseller and a Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club pick, it’s a stunning novel of literary fiction that depicts the lives of several women in Odessa, Texas during the 1970s as they wrestle with the aftermath of the rape of Gloria Ramirez early in the morning on Valentine’s Day, 1976. Told through the different women’s points of view, Wetmore puts on a master class in storytelling.

The novel opens with Gloria Ramirez escaping her assailant, Dale Strickland, who brutally attacked her the night before, as she trudges barefoot three miles through cow pastures to Mary Rose’s front porch, a pregnant mother at home with her young daughter. Gloria begs Mary Rose for water and shelter. Strickland eventually shows up for Gloria, but Mary Rose keeps him at bay by pointing her rifle at him until the cops show up. A tense opening to a novel that unspools the lives of these two women and the others that orbit this event: Corrine, young Debra Ann, Ginny, Suzanne, Karla. All of their lives are revealed and the indignities they face from the men in Odessa, as well as judgment and shame they face from the community as a whole when they don’t act the way they should: prim, proper, quiet, subservient. When Strickland gets off with only probation and a fine, this injustice sends Mary Rose off the deep end, her rage not easy to quell.

Escape from Oblivia is Brian Kindall's latest novel, part adventure story, part midlife crisis, and part allegory. Unlike his previous works, this book is set decidedly in modern times, giving Kindall the opportunity to examine masculinity and the tropes of manliness in literature. If you were born any time during the 20th century, then you would be aware of these tropes from macho adventure books, comic books, action movies, and the like; they were prevalent across all media. These tropes have been long overdue for a reckoning and Kindall is the man up for the task.

Kim and Kathy Hodges are sisters placed on seemingly different life paths. From the start, Kim is beautiful and smart; Kathy is plain and beset with disabilities. But these convenient characteristics don’t show the whole story—what is in someone’s heart and what makes someone a good person. As they grow up in their middle-class family, Kim resents the extra attention her sister receives from her parents and declares that her sister chokes the life out of her. It’s a cruel observation and one that doesn’t change for Kim, even as she grows into an adult. Her feelings for her sister calcify, even after her own traumas with sexual assault leave her unwilling to give or accept love in a healthy way. Both sisters have their own baggage to carry, but Kathy moves through life undeterred by the disabilities God gave her, or road blocks put in her way by life.

The Bottoms is an Edgar award-winning novel that is told in first-person by Harry Collins, an old man in a rest home, that reflects on his time as a boy in the 1930s, when he and his younger sister discover the corpse of a prostitute in the forest near their home. This discovery sets off a string of events where Harry’s father Jacob, the local constable, investigates a string of similar murders and the racist underbelly of the community of Marvel Creek, Texas comes to light. This novel is like a cross between Where the Red Fern Grows and To Kill a Mockingbird with a serial killer thrown into the mix.

Simon Han's debut novel, Nights When Nothing Happened, is a beautifully written and keenly observant literary telling of the Cheng family and their immigration to Plano, Texas from China. They selected Plano because of its reputation for safety, but the constant safety reminders at the school and pretty much everywhere they inhabit infiltrates their lives. Is Plano really safer than China? Plus, father Liang and daughter Annabel both have sleeping disorders which affect mother Patty and brother Jack. When Jack discovers that his sister sleepwalks, finding her down the street from their house late one night, we eventually discover the many secrets of the Cheng family, much of which is unpleasant. Is assimilation in America possible for this family? And did they make the right choice to move to Plano?

I read this novel as a young man and again later in my 30s. I thought I'd give it another read to see if it's as strange as I'd remembered. What a weird and quirky novel. Part war story, part science fiction, and part bizarro, observational comedy, I couldn't explain it concisely if I tried. The disparate plot (what little there is) tells the strange life of Billy Pilgrim, a WWII veteran who lived through the bombing of Dresden, one of the most horrific events of WWII. But he soon becomes "unstuck in time" and we careen back and forth throughout his life: his time as an optometrist, his time in WWII, the time he was abducted by aliens called Tralfamadorians, who see the entirety of time all at once. Strange story. Is Billy’s unstuck state an analogy for insanity? Could be. Vonnegut (he is the narrator of the novel and appears in the Dresden part of the story) tells this strange story with an empathetic lilt as he retells many of the disturbing events that Billy and the other characters endure, punctuating any mention of death with his well-known phrase, "So it goes."

This novel is a quirky dramedy about twin children—with the unusual ability to catch on fire—and their relationship with a down-on-her-luck woman hired as a nanny to take care of them, away from the spotlight of their politically ambitious father and stepmother. The nanny and stepmother, Lillian and Madison respectively, were friends at a prestigious private high school before Madison’s father paid Lillian’s mother to have Lillian take the fall for Madison’s drug bust. Fifteen years later, Madison calls Lillian out of the blue with a lucrative job offer to be the “governess” of her unusual step-children, Bessy and Roland, and keep them secluded as their father is up for position of Secretary of State. Lillian has no experience watching kids (including ones with unusual, supernatural powers), but she takes the job anyway as she has nothing better going on. I listened to the audiobook edition narrated by Marin Ireland.

This novel won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for fiction as well as the Kirkus Prize for fiction and the National Book Award for fiction. I approach these type of novels with long lists of accolades like this with trepidation, mostly because I’ve found I haven’t really enjoyed most of them. The same could be said for recent Oscar winning Best Picture movies (I’m looking at you, Green Book) or Grammy winning best albums of the year (I’m glaring at you, Morning Phase by Beck). With the exception of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, I haven’t enjoyed many of the recent Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction. They have left me wanting. Until now. The Nickel Boys is fantastic and well-deserves the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. With wide, impressionistic swathes, it paints a harrowing picture of a racist boys institution in Florida during the early to mid-twentieth century, and it does a masterful job in an efficient 200 pages.