A claustrophobic novel about destructive friends and destructive urges.
In Harper’s debut literary novel, a writer’s trip to an artsy town becomes an interminable nightmare.
For the past week, aspiring writer Morris Hines has been staying (and drinking) at the Manderlay Colony, an artists residence where he’d hoped to make some headway on his fantasy novel. Now, on his last night in town before returning home to Washington, D.C., and his fiancee, Yasmin, Morris has wandered into the Public House, a dive bar with no signage, patronized mostly by locals. There, he runs into Henry, an old friend from college whom Morris has not seen for a decade. Morris’ history with Henry is complex, and he isn’t thrilled to run into him—especially given how run-down Henry looks, with a puffy face and burns on his hands. A townwide electrical blackout provides Morris an opportunity to escape the bar before the past can be dredged up, but he misses his flight the next morning and can’t get a new one for two more days. This unintended extension of his off-season stay in the small town promises additional drunken nights and additional run-ins with Henry and his hard-living crowd. Will Morris be able to put his old ghosts to rest, or will a series of bad decisions leave him as broken as Henry? The author’s prose is breezy and straightforward, as when the bisexual Morris describes his days rooming with the gay Henry: “Sometimes they had sex, but most times, they didn’t. It became a little transaction between them, a ‘help me out’ moment when there was an itch that needed scratching. They rarely discussed it except to instruct in what they liked. After all, there was no point in stretching it out longer than it needed to be.” The mood is all over the place—sometimes menacing, sometimes comic, sometimes melodramatic—and the plot is not entirely convincing. Even so, Harper manages to capture the dislocation of a certain type of drinking binge, wherein the present starts to resemble a fun-house mirror of the past.
A claustrophobic novel about destructive friends and destructive urges.Pub Date: June 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781590215852
Page Count: 251
Publisher: Lethe Press
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
SEEN & HEARD
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