The perfect novel to combat pandemic angst.
Cooney’s brief but compelling novel—in which an unnamed chaplain takes readers on her rounds during one night at a large Northeastern hospital—explores issues like mortality, spiritual survival, and human connection.
The 36-year-old Episcopal chaplain, frizzy-haired and pear-shaped, has what her boss calls a natural gift for telling people what they need to hear. Her instinctive ability to soothe becomes increasingly evident as she travels from one patient to another. She is spiritual but practical. While she asks “What is a soul?” in the novel’s first line—and returns to the question in different guises throughout—the narrator’s spiritual quest does not cause her moral qualms about lying when necessary, whether to soothe a doctor who fears she's sinned or give hope to a dying chef who expects his former restaurant patrons to visit en masse. Her favorite patients are an elderly, deeply lonely librarian and a 15-year-old boy who’s survived a catastrophic accident physically shattered but with his gentle magnetism intact. Less appealing characters, like a lawyer who is rude to the staff, also receive her understanding. Each has a story. Often the stories lead the chaplain to stories from her own past. A subtle plot takes shape almost between the lines concerning the chaplain’s unresolved relationship with Plummy, a neuroscientist 10 years her junior now living in Germany, who's fascinated by out-of-body experiences, what he calls oobs; confronted during her shift with two possible oobs, the chaplain is forced to reexamine the idea of soul yet again but also to reconsider her relationship with Plummy. Those oob walks of the title may stretch credibility, but Cooney does a remarkable job structuring a novel of vignettes and stories within stories into a cohesive whole. Equally remarkable is her portrait of the chaplain as a personification of the potential for human goodness. Though introspective, the narrator is never self-absorbed. Her voice, funny and direct, keeps sentimentality at bay.
The perfect novel to combat pandemic angst.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-56689-597-2
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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