A flawed but unforgettable testament.
This bleak novel explores the horrendous impact of the Iraq war on women, both soldiers and civilians.
Based on research conducted for her nonfiction study of women serving in Iraq (The Lonely Soldier, 2009, etc.), Benedict’s fictional portrayal alternates the accounts of Kate, a young specialist stationed at Camp Bucca near Umm Qasr in Iraq, and Naema, a medical student whose family flees to the region after the catastrophic invasion and looting of Bagdad in 2003. Kate is one of three women in a barracks housing 33. Her worst enemies are not Iraqis (derogatorily known as hajjis) but her sergeant, Kormick, and another soldier nicknamed Boner. They sexually assault Kate (the exact nature of the assault is never revealed) on the day she is transferred to another detail, keeping watch in a guard tower overlooking the prison camp at Bucca. Shortly after Naema’s family moves in with her grandmother, American soldiers arrest her father (crippled by torture under Saddam) and preteen brother. Naema goes daily to the camp, where she encounters Kate, who bucks authority to try to get information regarding Naema’s relatives. The kindness of Kate’s comrade Jimmy is so unexpected in this snakepit of a milieu that love between the two, though it exacerbates Kate's dilemma, is inevitable. As the pressures on Kate mount (her tough, seemingly invincible bunkmate is raped by Kormick and Boner, and Kate’s attempts to file charges are laughed off), she revenges herself on the Iraqi detainees, who also single her out for torment because she is a woman. When, mistaking him for one of her prisoner-harassers, she brutalizes Naemas’ father, her spiral of self-destruction accelerates. The enormity of the problems—the woeful inadequacy of soldier’s equipment, the heat, the IEDs, the yawning gap between the mission of “liberation” and the chaos inflicted on Iraqis—that Benedict attempts to pack into such a brief space overwhelms the novel, fragmenting the storytelling into vivid but regrettably sketchy segments.
A flawed but unforgettable testament.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56947-966-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
Pub Date: April 7, 1998
ISBN: 0-446-52356-9
Page Count: 322
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
If the elusive Pynchon regularly cranked out novels, then this latest addition to his semi-classic oeuvre would be considered an excellent, if flawed, fiction, not as demanding and complex as Gravity's Rainbow, nor as neat and clever as The Crying of Lot 49 and V. As it is, coming 17 years since the last book, it's something of a disappointment.
Yes, it's compulsively funny, full of virtuoso riffs, and trenchant in its anarcho-libertarian social commentary. But there's a missing dimension in this tale of post-Sixties malaise—a sense of characters being more than an accumulation of goofy allusions and weird behavior. And all of its winding, conspiratorially digressive plot adds up to a final moment of apparently unintentional kitsch—a limp scene reuniting a girl and her dog. Built on flashbacks to the 60's, the story reenacts in 1984 the struggles that refuse to disappear. Not politics really, but the sense of solidarity and betrayal that marks both periods for the numerous characters that wander into this fictional vortex. At the center is Frenesi (Free and Easy) Gates, who's anything but. A red-diaper baby and radical film-maker during the rebellion-charged 60's, Frenesi sold her soul to a man in uniform, the quintessential Nixon-Reagan fascist, Brock Vond, a fed whose manic pursuit of lefties and dopers finds him abusing civil rights over three decades. He's motivated not just by innate evil, but by his obsession with Frenesi, whom he sets up as a sting-operation expert protected under the Witness Protection Program. Meanwhile, the venomous Vond sees to it that Frenesi's hippie husband, Zoyd Wheeler, and her daughter, Prairie, are "disappeared" to Vineland, the northern California town where L.A. counterculturalists lick their collective wounds among the redwoods, and bemoan "the heartless power of the scabland garrison state the green free America of their childhoods even then was turning into." Brilliant digressions on Californian left-wing history, the saga of The People's Republic of Rock and Roll, a Mob wedding, and the living dead known as the Thanatoids all come bathed in the clarity of Pynchon's eye-popping language.
Pynchon's latest should prove to the legions of contemporary scribbler-fakers that it isn't enough to reproduce pop-schlock on the page, it needs to be siphoned through the kind of imaginative genius on display everywhere here.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1990
ISBN: 0141180633
Page Count: 385
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1990
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