NO PRISONERS

A 90-year-old man’s life story is told, and told again.

This novel opens with musings about the memoir its protagonist meant to write, then abruptly switches to his funeral. Doyle Shields of Michigan—retired embalmer, Marine veteran, widower, and recovering alcoholic—has died at age 90, in the shower, while receiving oral sex. In its first chapter, the third-person narration describes him as someone who came to the enjoyment of reading only late in life, and notes that “reading had made Doyle all the more boorish, with mindless and unsolicited opinions and an inextinguishable flow of banter and blather.” The rest of the book sets out to prove it. It tells the story of Doyle’s life in spirals rather than a straight line, turning around his several obsessions. One is his horrific experiences as a teenage Marine in the South Pacific during World War II. Another is his long, mostly happy but ultimately unfulfilled marriage to Sally, whom he fell for in fifth grade and married right after the war. He sees it as unfulfilled because of another of his obsessions: oral sex, which Sally’s devout Catholicism ruled out as nonreproductive. (That leaves it forever conflated with religion in his mind, although he considers himself a nonbeliever.) After Sally’s death at 65, Doyle meets Johanna, an almost comically idealized younger lover who isn’t interested in marriage but puts up with his prattling and bossiness and seems as enthusiastic about giving and getting head as he is. He also hires an assistant and platonic companion, an even younger woman named Hypatia, whose main job seems to be to listen to him complain. There is emotional heft to some sections of the novel, especially the gruesome passages about the war. There are a few flashes of humor. The prose is occasionally lyrical, but it’s more often florid, overstuffed with elaborate, frequently repetitive description. That’s magnified by the looping structure, which returns to the same events with an effect that’s dulling rather than dramatic. By the time Doyle succumbs, it’s old news.

An insistently unlikable main character and redundant storytelling add up to an unsatisfying novel.