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MORTALS

Name: MORTALS
Author: Norman Rush
ISBN: 0-679-40622-0

by Norman Rush ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2003

Another National Book Award seems a distinct possibility.

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The collision of the “humanitarian” West with emergent Africa is relentlessly analyzed in this long-awaited second novel from Rush (stories: Whites, 1986; the NBA–winning Mating, 1991).

Rush spent several years in Botswana as a Peace Corps administrator, and his commanding theme is the mystery of Africa as experienced by strangers bent on civilizing it. One such is protagonist Ray Finch, a middle-aged English teacher and covert CIA operative enlisted to write “Lives” of suspicious persons. Ray leads a seemingly idyllic life in the Botswanan town of Gamborene with his beautiful wife Iris, interrupted only by her correspondence with his misfit homosexual brother Rex, a manipulative pseudointellectual who, in Ray’s opinion, “sees himself as . . . the gay Mencken.” More serious complications arise when Ray is reluctant to compile information about British-educated engineer and social reformer Samuel Kerekang (whom the Agency considers dangerous), instead investigating another recent arrival in Gamborene: black American holistic healer Davis Morel, an agnostic and pragmatist determined “to lift the yoke of Christianity from the neck of Africa.” This enormously ambitious tale scorns to summarize or telescope: Rex’s inane effusions and Morel’s criticisms of scripture, for example, are reproduced at exhaustive length—as are Iris and Ray’s (sexy and charming) romantic and sexual banterings. Everything changes irrevocably when Ray is sent northward, through the Kalahari Desert, to observe a violent rebellion by a coalition of Boer and Namibian forces, suffers an imprisonment and unexpected proof of his suspicions about Morel, and ironically becomes at last the man whom he has pretended all along to be. Mortals isn’t easy going, but Rush’s authoritative grasp of his subject, rich characterizations, and complex handling of issues of sexual and political fidelity, morality, and mortality make it a reading experience not to be missed.

Another National Book Award seems a distinct possibility.

Pub Date: June 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-679-40622-0

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
SUBTLE BODIES
by Norman Rush

- BOOK REVIEW
MATING
by Norman Rush

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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.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007

ISBN: 978-0-374-27912-7

Page Count: 624

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LARGESSE OF THE SEA MAIDEN
by Denis Johnson

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAUGHING MONSTERS
by Denis Johnson

- BOOK REVIEW
NOBODY MOVE
by Denis Johnson

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MURDER AT THE TAFFY SHOP

by Maddie Day ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 31, 2020

The romantic doings of the likable characters are more interesting than the mediocre mystery.

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A bike shop owner and her book club pals keep solving mysteries in ways that somehow don’t endear them to the police (Murder on Cape Cod, 2018, etc.).

Mackenzie Almeida, the proprietor of Mac’s Bikes in the touristy Cape Cod town of Westham, is dating Tim Brunelle, the caring and handsome owner of an artisanal bakery, who wants to get married and start a family. That’s not something independent neat freak Mac is ready to do. She enjoys living in her tiny house with Belle, her talkative parrot, for company. When Mac and her best friend, Gin, come across the dead body of wealthy Beverly Ruchart outside Gin’s taffy shop, Mac’s romantic problems get put on the back burner, especially since Gin is a suspect. She and her date, Eli Tubin, the widower of Beverly’s daughter, had attended a party at Beverly’s home only the night before. Beverly seems to have died from a heart attack, but an autopsy finds that she was poisoned with antifreeze, some of which has been planted in Gin’s garage. Of course Mac and her cohorts at the book club can’t resist a little sleuthing. They uncover several other plausible suspects: Beverly’s ne’er-do-well grandson, Ron, his Russian girlfriend, and his long-absent father, who has a police record. Although Beverly could be generous, she had a sharp tongue that made her plenty of enemies. Her interest in genealogy and reuniting long-lost parents and children endeared her to Wesley Farnham, for whom she found a son, but not so much to Farnham’s daughter, who misses being an only child. Although Mac turns her findings over to the police, she still attracts the killer’s notice and ends up owing her life to Belle.

The romantic doings of the likable characters are more interesting than the mediocre mystery.