by Marco North ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 9, 2022
A collection of cunningly conceived, poetically descriptive tales with layer upon layer of intrigue.
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Indie film writer and director North probes family bonds and rifts in “a novel-in-stories” set in America’s bleak backwaters and in less affluent parts of New York City.
North grew up in part on a pig farm in upstate New York, and the 11 linked tales in this collection reflect a keen understanding of the risks and rewards of rural life. Most stories center on Paul—like his creator, a pig farmer’s son—whose life is shaped by a quest for meaning. The first tale, “Percheron,” describes a man named Walter, who’s exploring fields and finds his elderly father eviscerated by a harvesting machine. Next comes “Wild Asparagus,” which introduces Paul, whose rural pursuits include witnessing a thunderstorm as a boy. “Albino,” one of the longer stories, centers on Hitch, a guitarist who’s picking his way westward across America. Another, “The Golden Macaroni,” focuses on Trish, a chain-smoking mother and caregiver for her 35-year-old son with disabilities, Charlie, who is celebrating his birthday. The focus returns to Paul in “Cooper’s Farm,” which recalls the joys and difficulties he had growing up on a pig farm, including his evolving relationships with his father and brother. In later stories, Paul joins the Navy and works as a guard at the Central Park Zoo. Stories in this book often wrap around one another intriguingly. In “The Year of the Horse,” for example, part of the narrative shifts to rural Russia to examine the life of Paul’s alcoholic wife, Anya. That tale forms a vital keystone in the atmospheric collection, smartly linking the stories that came before.
North’s use of interconnected stories leads to an intentionally fragmented narrative, which works strongly to the advantage of the book. At times the tales are poetic shards that evoke a particular atmosphere: “Little brother sleeps under blue eyes, a tiny O at his lips, whispering his sleep dreams of fresh-cut grass and bubbles, of seashells and broken shoelaces.” At other times the narrative interweaves longer stories to develop the character of Paul, whose subtle observations of the world from childhood onward prove captivating: “The strange laughter from his father—so loud, so taken. His mother’s half caught smiles—trying to hide her teeth.” The writing may be laconic, but it enables North to create emotionally revealing tableaux using short, spare sentences: “They buried his father under cherry trees, as he had wished. Blossoms littered the moist earth and stuck to everyone’s shoes.” Over the course of the book, there are also unexpected literary forays. One gives a flâneur’s view of Manhattan that’s vaguely reminiscent of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems in its preoccupation with urban miscellany: “He turned south, passing museums and tourists, hotdog carts, horse-drawn carriages, police cars, the zoo where he would not work today, old women in giant sunglasses, little boys in new suits.” Readers will be eager to understand how the stories intersect, and although some may struggle at first with the seemingly disjointed and abstract nature of the narrative, the denouement is well worth the wait.
A collection of cunningly conceived, poetically descriptive tales with layer upon layer of intrigue.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-9897153-3-1
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Bittersweet Editions
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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National Book Award Finalist
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
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