A well-written, thoughtful military thriller that appreciates complexities and tells an exhilarating story.
In this novel set during the Vietnam War, a U.S. Army investigator tries to solve the mystery of a Caucasian man’s death.
It’s 1970, and George Tanner, a young American military police investigator, is in his 32nd month in South Vietnam. He’s charged with unraveling an unusual case: why did a Caucasian man wearing U.S. military gear walk out of the rain forest 100 kilometers north of Saigon in the middle of the night and straight up to an American infantry outpost? He was killed by the post’s defenders, but he lacked identification and his mission remains enigmatic. During Tanner’s probe, he comes up against the corruption and cynicism surrounding the failing American operation in Vietnam. Tanner’s commanding officer, for example, scoffs at the very idea of a real inquiry: “I don’t give an old whore’s fuck whether your procedures call for a tidy checklist wherein you eliminate possibilities with your Saigon cop buddies. What I want from you is one thing—a finding that the casualty was not an American.” While Tanner follows clues involving a rubber plantation, a showgirl, a warlord, and a wealthy socialite, he also tries to persuade his lover, a Vietnamese woman named Tuyet, to return to America with him, but Saigon is her home. With many forces arrayed against him, Tanner plays a dangerous game. Wallace (The Known Outcome, 2016), a former U.S. Army officer, draws on his experience for verisimilitude, which gives this thriller a solid backing. Tanner’s knowledge of Army procedures derives him as much solid information from repair slips and serial numbers as he gets from tough-guy action sequences—though there are plenty of those. Wallace’s pacing is taut, his characters well developed, and his Vietnamese locations authentic and beautifully evoked. The author also brings forth the war’s horrors and ironies with many well-judged observations, as when Tanner compares the Army to an old Roman road: “Commanders were its stones fitted together to withstand heavy loads”; a corrupt commander “had crumbled like a clay clod under a boot.”
A well-written, thoughtful military thriller that appreciates complexities and tells an exhilarating story.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9983291-3-0
Page Count: 302
Publisher: MC Publications
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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