“How I would love to be an angel of books!”

I love the sound of the word angel – from the Greek angelos (messenger) – and to an extent I am a “messenger” of books.

I admit, I do not keep up with the latest books. I am bewildered by the sheer number, and yet the same few books are reviewed in all the book pages. And they mostly sound wonderful. “Ms. X is an extraordinary writer,” or “Mr. Y has achieved a lyrical intensity …”

And yet often they disappoint. The late Stephen Dixon, who wrote his books on a typewriter, attributed this decline partly to technological changes. He said he could tell the difference between books written on typewriters and computers, and thought the typewriter better suited to creativity.

I have not, alas, kept my New Year’s resolution to read more new books. So far I have made it through only one new novel. Kudos to Adam Haslett because I actually finished his novel, Mothers and Sons! And, no, I did not love it, but it was a good read. In my book journal I am always a softie and give five stars to everything, but poor critically-acclaimed Haslett got only a four (very good) as opposed to the coveted five (stellar).

Here’s why you might like Mothers and Sons: it is a complicated delineation of a distant relationship between a gay man, Peter, an asylum lawyer in New York, and his mother, Ann, a former Episcopalian minister who becomes a lesbian and establishes a retreat center for women.

You would think the gay thing would strengthen the bond between mother and son, but it doesn’t work that way. Peter was traumatized in his teens by killing a friend during a fight; he has never recovered, and Ann minimized the incident and forbade him to talk about it.

As a result, he is a lost soul, a silent victim. He has never come to terms with Jared’s death, and has no friends, only acquaintances and co-workers. All day he prepares to go to court on behalf of illegal immigrants, doing tedious, repetitive interviews and trying to gather information (mostly hearsay) to convince the judge to give the clients asylum.

Peter’s personal life is empty and dreary, and the prose reflects this. So much of the book consists of dull, clipped dialogue with his clients, who have tragic stories and suffer from PTSD. Haslett captures the dreariness of listening to these stories all day, but Peter’s listlessness is also boring to the reader. I just wanted to have a laugh sometimes, but there was no relief in sight.

Here’s the good news: the style does liven up after 80 pages, when Peter reluctantly takes on the case of a gay Albanian client, whose situation, though more dire, was comparable to Peter’s. Haslett relaxes, the characters become more three-dimensional, and the Albanian guy does have a laugh occasionally, which improves Peter’s bleak world view..

I disliked the sections about Ann. She is a flat character, cold and serene – but mostly cold – and though she likes listening to the women on retreat, she is basically channeling her ministerial platitudes. She is almost too involved with people: her lesbian relationship has become routine so she has fallen in love with another woman. While Peter has no involvements, she has too many.

Ann wants to see Peter, but she cannot connect with him over the phone, and doesn’t try very hard, either. He never visits. His kooky sister Liz visits both Ann and Peter, and Liz wonders loudly why neither one is interested in her. (We wonder, too.) She is simply their interpreter. I do wish there had been more about Liz. She provides some color. Stylistically, this book is gray, if I had to pick a color, but there is hope at the end.

As for books I’ve loved this month: yes, they are classics. I enjoyed The Drinking Den, the seventh volume in Zola’s 20-book cycle of naturalistic novels, Les Rougart-Macquart, in which he studied the effects of heredity and the environment on one family.

Zola’s novels are steamy pot-boilers, erupting with sex, crime, politics, and poverty. In The Drinking Den, a struggling family is shattered by alcoholism. This was a best-seller in 19th-century France, and created such a scandal that Zola’s next novel, A Love Episode, was an uncharacteristically toned-down love story. Not as popular, though.

In many ways, I find The Drinking Den terrifying. It is a hyper-realistic portrayal of the illness wrought by alcohol, the loss of jobs, the inability to meet commitments, and in this case, starvation and death. The heroine, Gervaise, works as a laundress after her lover, Lantier, deserts her, and she struggles to support their two sons. After marrying her neighbor, the hard-working construction worker, Coupeau, she opens her own laundry business. This smart couple is climbing up the ladder of class, until Coupeau has an accident, ironically caused by their daughter Nana, who calls out to him when he is working on a roof. (In a later novel, Nana, she has become a high-end prostitute.)

But it is all downhill after Lantier, Gervaise’s ex-boyfriend, returns and lures Coupeau down the road to alcoholism. This is a grim novel, and yet Zola has what I call a “noisy” voice: the writing rips along and you cannot put it down even when you’re exhausted by the fall of the family.

Does anyone have any recommendations of new books? It’s still my New Year’s resolution…