BUFFALO BOY AND GERONIMO

Name: BUFFALO BOY AND GERONIMO
Author: James Janko
ISBN: 1-931896-19-4

by James Janko ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2006

An anti-war novel certainly, but very much its own kind. Pervasively melancholy, folkloric in approach, it’s sustained by...

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A beautifully written first novel about the ugliness of war—in Vietnam and anywhere else.

It’s 1970, and circumstances surrounding the life of 14-year-old Mong, Buffalo Boy, are harrowing, a consequence of the lethal attention emanating from Cu Chi, the main base of the 25th Infantry Division. Whether from the air (saturation bombing) or on the ground (napalm attacks), there has been destruction enough to cost Mong his father; in fact, no one in his village has escaped grievous loss. And yet, Mong, astride his buffalo Great Joy, feels empowered, transcending a reality composed of “scarred earth, of green rice fields burned, of trees and huts burned, ravaged.” Moreover, Mong has managed to fall in love—with Thien, also 14, whose breasts and hips fill his imagination with poetry. In the 25th Division, there’s another boy, only slightly older, Antonio Lucio Conchola, who calls himself Geronimo, a talismanic name from which he derives a sense of invulnerability. Geronimo has poetry in him, too, but war and killing have made him unnervingly strange, a condition that alienates him from his comrades. In that half-mad state, he has an almost otherworldly encounter with a tiger, perceiving the great beast as Blake did—burning bright. As a result, he decides that his only sensible course is to resign from the war, permanently. He wanders away from his platoon, eventually to be taken prisoner by Mongo. It’s an odd captivity, noticeably deficient in malice or enmity. It is as if, across the cultural and racial divide, the boys have somehow achieved an iota of affinity.

An anti-war novel certainly, but very much its own kind. Pervasively melancholy, folkloric in approach, it’s sustained by prose that is often lyrical, though never self-conscious.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2006

ISBN: 1-931896-19-4

Page Count: 124

Publisher: Curbstone Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SEASONS OF HER LIFE

by Fern Michaels ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1994

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A fat pancake of a novel, the author's second hardcover production tells the life story of one Ruby Blue—from an abused childhood and youth, to years as wife of a Marine, personal liberation, life in the world of industry, and her golden years in a rural retreat. Throughout the career of Ruby Blue, monster men abound. There's Papa George in their Pennsylvania home, a slasher, smacker, and wife beater, who requires that his daughters repay him, in bucks, for the cost of raising them. Then there's Ruby's husband, Andrew (met in those WW II glory days in D.C.), who is heavy on the verbal abuse and generally amoral. Ruby's lifelong friend Dixie is regularly slugged mercilessly by husband Hugo. Ruby's longtime true love, Calvin, is a gentle soul, but his wife, Eva, is as lethal as the men; fortunately for Calvin, she lacks the biceps. Ruby weathers life with Andrew at Marine bases and puts up with his callous treatment of their two children, but after Andrew admits to having gambled away their son's college money she finally decamps to New Jersey. Ruby soldiers on with Dixie, and their kitchen cookie business goes international in no time. As for the men, they'll get theirs: Papa George is Bobbittized with scalding grape jelly; the late Hugo's ashes get lost in traffic; and Ruby dumps Calvin. But Andrew sees the light. Glop. However, bear in mind the author's smashing success in paperback, including her Texas saga (5 million sold).

Pub Date: April 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-345-36774-X

Page Count: 528

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TREE OF SMOKE

by Denis Johnson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2007

It’s more than coincidence that the novel features two sets of relatives whose blood ties are once removed, for the family...

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Within the current political climate, the reader might expect a new novel about the war in Vietnam to provide a metaphor for Iraq. Yet Denis Johnson has bigger whales to land in his longest and most ambitious work to date. Tree of Smoke is less concerned with any individual war than with the nature of war, and with the essence of war novels. There are echoes here of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (particularly as transformed by Francis Ford Coppola into Apocalypse Now) and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, yet Johnson’s achievement suggests that each generation gets the war—and the war novel—it deserves.

At the center of Johnson’s epic sprawl is Colonel Francis Sands, the novel’s Captain Ahab, a character of profound, obsessive complexity and contradiction. Is he visionary or madman, patriot or traitor? Dead or alive? Or, somehow, all of the above? Because the reader perceives the Colonel (as he is reverently known) through the eyes of other characters, he shimmers like a kaleidoscope of shifting impressions. His military involvement in Asia preceded Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and he has continued to operate as a CIA agent within the shadows of Vietnam, while perhaps answering to no authority higher than his own.
From World War II through the war in Vietnam, much has changed—allegiances and alliances, public sentiment, the modes of modern warfare. Yet the Colonel hasn’t—he won’t or he can’t. Though he is plainly the novel’s pivotal figure, Johnson spends more time inside the psyche of the Colonel’s nephew, William “Skip” Sands, whose father died in action and whose enlistment extends a family tradition. He’s as naïve as the Colonel is worldly, as filled with self-doubt as his uncle is free of it, but he ultimately joins his relative in psychological operations against the enemy—whomever that may be. Eventually, he must decide whether it is possible to serve both his legendary relative and his country.
A less engaging subplot concerns half-brothers Bill and James Houston, who enter the war as teenagers to escape their dead-end lives in Arizona. Where the Sands family operates on the periphery of the war, the Houstons are deep in the muck of it. Though they are what once might have been called cannon fodder, the war gives their lives definition and a sense of mission, of destiny, that is missing back home—which will never again feel like home after Vietnam.

It’s more than coincidence that the novel features two sets of relatives whose blood ties are once removed, for the family that one chooses is ultimately more important than the family into which one happens to be born. Thus it is all the more imperative to choose wisely—and all the more difficult, given the duplicity that the war seems to require for self-preservation. As the novel obliterates all distinctions between good and evil, allies and enemies, loyalty and betrayal, it sustains the suspense of who will survive long enough to have the last word.