A raunchy but memorable military tale.
Woodard (Wearing the Cat: Part One, 2016, etc.) delivers the second installment in his satirical series about a Navy dentist.
Lt. Nick McGill is stationed at an air base in Japan. As a member of the Dental Corps, his duties on base tend to involve drilling teeth and waiting around for dental emergencies, and he tries to keep his sanity despite military rigmarole. McGill engages in plenty of scenes of military comedy (some involving a rival lieutenant who develops a foot condition). His off-base actions, though, are at the heart of this bumpy adventure. He learns a lot about Japan as he teaches English to a high-rolling businessman named Mr. Sanbuichi, and he also falls in love with a local woman named Saori Sawa. He ventures into the country with gusto, noting that “If a spindly, Brit could become Lawrence of Arabia, then surely he, an American Uberlieutenant and Dentist, could become McGill of Japan.” Along the way, the Navy man becomes steeped in Japanese mythology and cuisine—he learns about a fabled fox with seven tails and the dangers of fugu fish, for example—all while pursuing sex with local women. Woodard makes clear that McGill doesn’t shy away from crassness; for instance, the lieutenant frequently refers to his “hardometer”—a metaphorical measurement of how erect his penis is. When a plane crash occurs on base, however, the novel takes a darker turn, and McGill’s story takes on a new level of earnestness. Readers will find that when a goofy figure like McGill deals with the unimaginable task of identifying mangled bodies, it gives the book a striking, unexpected realism. They’ll wonder how a man whose normal day-to-day concerns revolve around crude sexual fantasies deals with sea gulls picking at the remains of his former colleagues. The McGill that eventually emerges may still compare an indigestion-induced bowel movement to “fifty gallons of rich brown gravy,” but both he and readers come away with a fuller understanding of life and loss by the end of the novel.
A raunchy but memorable military tale.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5410-1639-2
Page Count: 504
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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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