An undisciplined but often captivating love story, filtering strained emotion through vaulting intellectualism.
Two lovers contemplate their relationship along with philosophy, subatomic physics, and other topics in Bernard’s romance.
The novel begins with a vaguely described and possibly violent rupture between a woman named Sasha Kamenev and her boyfriend, Pascal, who then repair to the titular bar to rehash and ruminate over their years-long, intermittent relationship. The story unfolds as a series of dialogues between the duo that are dominated by Pascal’s long soliloquies, with the more reticent Sasha interjecting comments that tend to puncture his grandiosity (He: “let’s live in a big, soft windblown bubble of enchantment, a fantasy of what life might have been if our gods had been kind and wise and not what they are: rocks and wind and exploding suns and galaxies driving across space like hurricanes.” She: “Will you please shut up?”). These exchanges reveal next to nothing about the material circumstances of their lives, dwelling instead on the emotional friction between Pascal, who vacillates between claiming to be ardently in love with Sasha and affecting a stance of alienation from love in general, and Sasha, who adopts a cooler, warier attitude toward the domineering Pascal. The conversations broaden out to explore Pascal’s worldview, touching on his misanthropy toward the “shabby, flawed, shameless…lazy or brutal or stupid” run of humanity; his Nietzschean sense that individual autonomy and happiness are the highest goals; his resentment over being rejected by women he is attracted to (Sasha being a rare exception); his horror at the Newtown, Connecticut school shooting; his trepidation about AI’s potential to become humanity’s master; and his impressions of the Higgs boson. In her responses, Sasha usually upholds countervailing values of love and connectedness, but occasionally gives way to her own pessimism, at one point declaring herself a new species because humankind is such a disgrace.
With no plot to speak of, Bernard’s novel is essentially a chamber piece about two people cautiously inching their way toward—and sometimes away from—commitment, through a thicket of digressive thinking and talking. The prose is dense and elliptical, with philosophical disquisitions suddenly erupting into cryptic prose poems (“Virtue won’t make you happy. Not vice, not money, not love. Happiness makes you happy, then it bores you and you decide to try misery just for a change. Though escaping misery is not the snap that escaping happiness is”). The author is often self-indulgent, but he’s also a gifted writer; when he hits, he’s capable of gorgeous lyricism. On a seashore, he conjures “[t]he endless distant roll and crash of waves along the beach, the lulling confusion of whiteness, a serene and tranquil drama raving and collapsing without a pause from horizon to horizon.” Bernard also delivers penetrating insights into love and its failures: “Did you ever realize how divorce destroys in a particularly cruel way even the happiest memories of a marriage? How every memory of some joy you may have had is poisoned by the knowledge of what followed?” Black-and-white photos—portraits of prim Edwardian children, anti-portraits of adults with their faces blurred, snowscapes with the outlines of trees and light poles barely visible—lend an arresting, ghostly visual aura to the story.
An undisciplined but often captivating love story, filtering strained emotion through vaulting intellectualism.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2020
ISBN: 9781587905148
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Regent Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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