Despite panoramic ambitions, the novel never quite catches fire.
An anti-imperialist fairy tale about the building of the Panama Canal.
Henríquez’s novel begins in 1907, with work on the canal well underway, and reveals how its construction changes the lives of multiple characters of varying nationalities, classes, and races, each in Panama for their own reasons. Henríquez is skilled at juggling the many subplots. Among the central characters, Ada Bunting from Barbados is the stereotypical sentimental heroine. The biracial 16-year-old has come to Panama to earn money to save her ailing sister’s life; she gets a job nursing the sick wife of wealthy, idealistic, but emotionally stunted malaria researcher John Oswald (whose under-explored complexity makes him one of the book’s more interesting characters). Plucky Ada begins a tepid romance with young Panamanian Omar Aquino, whose broken relationship with his fisherman father Francisco exemplifies the divided loyalties and resentments of Panamanians treated as second-class citizens in their own country. Francisco sells to fishmonger Joaquín, whose wife ropes her husband into organizing a demonstration of passive resistance against Canal Commission orders to dismantle and move her entire hometown. A host of other characters are sketched in, from an Antiguan cook who undermines Ada to an inept French doctor, an intuitive palm reader, and a Barbadian sugar planter in love with Ada’s mother but too weak-willed to fight for her. Along the way, Henríquez plugs in the history that many North Americans probably don’t know: the Panamanian civil war and intervention by the United States, which paid the country, newly independent from Colombia, $10 million dollars for full control of the Canal Zone. The depiction of white North Americans and Caribbean planters as at best clueless, more often mercenary and cruelly racist, is undoubtedly accurate. Unfortunately, and despite Henríquez’s lyrical prose, they never feel fully realized as individuals. Neither does virtuous Ada, the noble Panamanians, or Mrs. Oswald, a representative of white female victimhood who has sacrificed her intellectual ambition for a loveless marriage.
Despite panoramic ambitions, the novel never quite catches fire.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9780063291324
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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