An evocative but sometimes turgid portrait of a troubled soul in a bewildering land.
An American expatriate in China encounters filth, fraud, and fickle women in this fictionalized memoir.
Acerbi frames his book as a third-person narrative about “Jim,” an American student who travels to the Chinese city of Wuhan in 2013, ostensibly to study at Wuhan University but mainly to reunite with his long-distance girlfriend, Lan. Lan promptly dumps Jim to kick off his creeping disenchantment with all things Chinese. He’s also appalled by the dirt and disorder, the ubiquitous construction work, the “dense layer of black grime” in commercial kitchens, the “odor of stagnant sewage,” the rats trundling about in restaurants, the scams that hustlers run on him, and the baffling disorganization of the Chinese bureaucracy (one visa office functionary does nothing but play video games). Then there’s Jim’s vexed experiences with other Chinese women, who are friendly and even forward thanks to his barbarian virility but then blow him off when things get serious. He gets engaged to Dina, a university staffer entranced by the sweat that “glistened from the rippled surfaces of his lean muscularity,” but she also starts a relationship with her boss, Peng, that Jim thinks is sexual. A Kafkaesque melodrama ensues: Jim breaks into Dina’s room looking for signs of infidelity, imagines she has been brainwashed, sends her threatening emails—“I will tell your father and mother that every day you go with your manager to a hotel to have sexual intercourse”—and contemplates murdering Peng. Jim is eventually questioned by police and kicked off campus. Acerbi’s well-observed panorama of Chinese culture brims with shrewd insights—“calling the police is snitching, breaking the unspoken code that conflict resolution should occur through hierarchical relationships or sheer force if need be, but never through official channels”—and vivid scenes. (At an internet cafe, “emaciated addicts of video games…frittered away their nights here pretending to be muscled superheroes in pathetic fantasy lands….They burned everything with their cigarettes, from the seats to the tables to the computers’ USB ports.”) Unfortunately, the narrative often bogs down like a diary in the details of Jim’s aimless socializing. His stalking of Dina feels deranged but also dreary as he endlessly rehashes the eye-glazing minutiae of his obsessions. Readers may grow tired waiting for Jim to realize how bad his own behavior has been.
An evocative but sometimes turgid portrait of a troubled soul in a bewildering land.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73445-441-3
Page Count: 267
Publisher: LSI Holdings, LLC
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2020
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
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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