A strangely readable, if somewhat amorphous, tale of contemporary White male stagnation.
In this debut literary novel, a pill-popping malcontent fails spectacularly to be the man he wants to be.
Dash Moore is perpetually at odds with the world around him. A contrarian by nature, he tends to say things that put people on the defensive, which can lead to clumsy social interactions. He’s also an alcoholic who takes cough pills for the DXM high, which leads to more awkward social situations: “Some people don’t respond to my direct eye-contact way of behaving. The drugs numb me against self-consciousness. I can stare dead straight in a person’s eye for as long as they let me. People are affected by it.” He’s bitter about a lot of things: The novel he wasn’t able to publish; the girl he wasn’t able to date; the acne he had in high school. He’s unemployed, forced to resort to shoplifting his boxed wine from Walmart, and still living at home with his parents at the age of 31. He’s got a lot of time to wander around and meet fascinating people, though this freedom is, at best, a mixed bag. While sitting on a bench behind a strip mall, he ends up in a conversation with a man who’s just committed a mass shooting. A friend from middle school he’s just reconnected with may be a serial killer, which leads to a very uncomfortable discussion. Dash gets a freelance writing job from a man who wants him to compose stories about dragons. He bounces from situation to situation, always mildly confused but mostly apathetic, scarred by the unresolved traumas of his adolescence and nearly debilitated by his chemical addictions. Will he be able to write himself out of years of failure and into a happy ending? Or is he simply the same as the weirdos with whom he seems forever doomed to share his days?
Dash is off-putting in nearly every way: antagonistic, neurotic, lazy, whiny, judgmental, self-admittedly racist, and indefensibly enamored with his own intellect. But even with all these strikes against Dash, Bingham manages to make him an oddly compelling and accessible protagonist. Here, Dash offers his credentials as someone who reads widely: “I read Jezebel and the Root, two blogs about feminism and black people’s issues. I find a lot of what they say to be at odds with how I view reality, but I still read them. I’m not saying they’re wrong in their views. I just don’t agree with them mostly. I could be wrong.” He’s the sort of man whom most people would simply write off as a jerk—and plenty of the other characters in the novel do just that—but over time, his dysfunctions and their causes become apparent. The book has barely any plot, but readers will come to know Dash and through him, a certain sort of entitled White, straight man of the Donald Trump era: the pox-on-both-your-houses know-it-all, the slacker who can’t be bothered to change and doesn’t appreciate being asked to. The ending does not deliver acceptance, but it does provide an unexpected bit of understanding.
A strangely readable, if somewhat amorphous, tale of contemporary White male stagnation.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 271
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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