A sometimes-confusing tale that doesn’t stand out from the crowd of Vietnam War narratives.
Meece’s (Drifting in Paradise, 2017, etc.) novel follows a sonar technician on the USS Abel in the South China Sea during the Vietnam War.
Petty Officer John Mason longs for his home state of Kentucky as he reckons with the unfamiliar surroundings of combat. The story starts with the Abel patrolling near a small fishing village, anchoring, handing out soda to South Vietnamese soldiers, and receiving orders to shell the nearby forest for days on end. From Mason’s perspective, the banal cruelty of the artillery strike is just another sign of the corruption of an American government that took him away from his fiancee, Sonya, and threw him into harm’s way. Meanwhile, there’s race and class oppression on the Abel, where the enlisted men resent the overbearing, shortsighted officers. Their conversations aboard the ship and belowdecks veer from good-natured joking to nihilistic musing, often from one moment to the next. As the ship moves up the coastline to Hong Kong and back, the crew’s frustration heats up until it reaches a boiling point. And when Mason learns that Sonya has moved on, he feels that he has little left to lose. There are moments of striking depth in this book (“The lives of all are staked on the performance of each”) and other occasions of hilarity, but generally the dialogue feels stilted. Meece does employ some uniquely vivid language at times: “What an offer! I accept with alacrity”; “You imagine the satisfying feel of fisting him good in the middle of his face.” However, the frequent, midchapter shifts in perspective can be confusing; one moment, Mason is relating events in the first person, and then a third-person narrator takes over. Most oddly, the narration addresses Mason as “you” when it delves into Mason’s past. These stylistic choices make the prose difficult to follow and add little to the story.
A sometimes-confusing tale that doesn’t stand out from the crowd of Vietnam War narratives.Pub Date: June 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5446-6323-4
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Kwest House
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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