An earnest novel of self-discovery and sexuality.
In Spang’s literary novel, a closeted man searches for identity in Vietnam War–era West Virginia.
The Vietnam War is raging, and Jason Follett isn’t sure what terrifies him more: the fact that he might get drafted, or the fact that he might be gay. The Chicago-raised, Vanderbilt Divinity School–educated young man needs time and space to figure himself out, and so he takes a job as the Head Start director in the small, rural town of Pearsall Flats, West Virginia. He rents an apartment from a local minister and his wife with a view of the Potomac River, part of a vacation property that the minister allows some friends to use for extramarital trysts. He befriends Carole Goldsmith, a preacher’s wife and fellow Head Start director who, like Jason, has no idea what she’s doing. The Goldsmiths provide Jason with a surrogate family as he struggles to get the churches of Pearsall Flats to accept a “Yankee” non-religious daycare open to both white and Black children. Though Jason is still in the closet—and dating women in order to keep it that way—he cannot help but come across men who, openly or not, share his attraction to other men. There’s the confirmed bachelor opera buff, the handsome tenant farmer, the glue-sniffing high school achiever, the interracial couple, and even Jason’s minister landlord. “I wouldn’t call it that,” the minister answers with a laugh when Jason asks him, directly, if he’s gay. “I just prefer men…Can we leave it at that?” Jason makes his way between and around these men with a mix of longing and revulsion until he meets Eric Kendrick, a painter and health counselor who lives in the open. Jason falls for Eric, but is he ready to commit to a marginalized identity, or should he take his chances with Debra, a volunteer and idealist with whom he might be able to lead a more conventional life?
Spang captures Jason’s inner turmoil in plainspoken prose, as here when he contemplates his path, Thoreau-like, while gazing over the nearby river, wondering, “I could forget if I were gay or straight, if I should rip up Eric’s card or call him up, if I should start dating someone else, if I should be as others wanted me to be, or if I should be myself. If, indeed, I knew what I was.” The setting is a rich one, and Spang does a fine job playing Jason’s artistic ambitions and Great Society idealism against the complex religiosity of both the people he meets and of Jason himself. The plot offers few real surprises, however, and for this reason its nearly 400-page length feels much too long. The text often reads like a memoir, lacking the immediacy or dynamism of fiction. Even when startling things happen—like a deadly fire that kills a child—they can land with a thud. The novel will likely appeal most to readers with their own memories of the time period, when it was much harder for people to openly be themselves.
An earnest novel of self-discovery and sexuality.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798990774407
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Wisdom House Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
SEEN & HEARD
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