This book perplexes without provoking more meaningful engagement.
The most recent novel collaboratively written by Sheila Ascher and Dennis Straus under the name Ascher/Straus explores a world in which identity is not only mutable, but in constant flux.
The opening image of this surreal and often baffling novel is an idyllic scene of childhood. There is a lake, children, a grandmotherly figure, and a baby experimenting with the protolanguage of infancy while he bangs his sippy cup against his highchair. The narrative voice, unattached to any of these figures, functions in a kind of a documentary-style overlay that informs the reader of their position in relation to this scene: “Always from the outside, we feel life gather….The completeness of life, but only from the outside and from a distance.” This position is the one the reader will occupy for the rest of this iconoclastic project in which narrative structure, character development, even the flow of time take a back seat to the pyrotechnics of form. After the brief lakeside prologue, the novel restarts in a diner from which a boy named Junior with no memory or sense of himself is retrieved by a bumbling henchman-type figure named Waldo Bunny, who returns him to his mother, Penny. These figures—Junior, Waldo Bunny, Penny, and various fathers, among others—reoccur, occupying different relationships to each other and themselves as the book builds a gathering sense of the sinister, the occluded, or the forgotten rather than an accumulation of chronological scenes. The result is confusing. Characters blend into each other or perform seemingly significant actions and then abruptly disappear. There is a tendency for the narrative voice to branch off into extended similes that obscure the originating object rather than illuminate through comparison. For example, when one of Junior’s father figures is home alone, he feels his house is like “a capsule orbiting and isolated in space—and inside the isolated space capsule himself, small and shriveled as the last raisin stuck to the bottom of a little two ounce raisin box that’s just been emptied into the mouth of an ailing child standing on the sidewalk and waiting to be driven to a hospital where he’ll spend years isolated in a pod with food tray and television set.” The fact that this image later turns out to provide some situational context for one of the more developed plotlines does not excuse the lengths the reader is expected to go in order to participate in the scene. While there are some moments of real insight, the book as a whole reads like an experiment in process that does not fully congeal into a project—resulting in a frustrating experience for even the most patient and open-minded of readers.
This book perplexes without provoking more meaningful engagement.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-62054-049-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: McPherson & Company
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
