An in-depth look at an officer’s bawdy tour of duty.
A debut satirical novel follows one man’s adventures as a dentist in the U.S. Navy.
The year is 1988 and Dr. Nick McGill is a lieutenant in the Navy. McGill is a member of the Dental Corps stationed in Williamsville, Florida, and dealing with foul breath and unpleasant characters is simply part of the job. No one likes going to the dentist and McGill comes to expect his patients to utter the phrase “I hate dentists,” whether they are demanding retirees or drunk Marines. A bright spot in such a tough occupation comes in the form of Dental Technician Second Class Sayers. DT2 Sayers, as McGill refers to her, is his sexy and playful assistant. With her “world class butt,” she would seem like the perfect candidate for a fling, the only problem being that McGill is an officer and Sayers an enlisted sailor. Any physical relationship between the two would be an offense worthy of a court-martial. There is also the thorny issue of Sayers having been kicked out of her previous stationing in Japan. What could she have done to merit expulsion from a country? While part two of the story sees McGill heading to Japan with all sorts of culture shock fumbling (including a difficult time eating octopus), the main drive of the narrative occurs in part one. Will Sayers and McGill ever get together and, if so, at what cost? Full of slapstick moments and bodily fluids (blood, vomit, and stool provide not only humor, but also help move the story along), the book makes for a nuanced, if crude, look at a small corner of the U.S. military. Woodard’s examination moves steadily, though it loses some steam. With the issue of Sayers resolved in part one, part two can prove to be less thrilling. Sure, Japan is a strange and exotic place for an American, but without a pressing issue, McGill’s discoveries, such as the fact that Japanese grape soda contains actual grapes (“There were grapes in the goddamn soda,” he observes), do not have as much urgency as his time stewing in sexual limbo in Florida.
An in-depth look at an officer’s bawdy tour of duty.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5412-7088-6
Page Count: 414
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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