A gripping account that will appeal to fiction-lovers and war historians alike.
A 17-year-old protagonist captures the Vietnam War experience with eloquence and wit.
Richard Murphy drops out of high school during his senior year to volunteer for the Vietnam War. He likens the opportunity to the rush a football player feels when he’s headed to the playoffs, making it clear that Richard is not your typical 1970-era army enlistee. Neither is this slim novel the typical, ham-handed war epoch. Vidaurri, who also served in Vietnam from 1970 to 1972, paints a complex image of the war, using excerpts of fictionalized letters and subtle psychological analysis. Wide-eyed and observant, Richard arrives in Chu Lai, Vietnam, and immediately realizes the worthlessness of his army training. He has never seen a land mine, isn’t aware that he should avoid bathing alone in the rivers and is nearly flattened by the oppressive heat. But after adapting, he becomes a tank gunner who witnesses the quiet beauty of Vietnam as well as the brutality of war. The author describes the thrill of pristine beaches and the South China Sea as well as the hazards of fire ants, snakes and tree mines. We meet Mata, a stoic soldier on his fifth tour of Vietnam who walks off into the jungle rather than leave the country with the rest of the army. Richard and his best friend Edward celebrate their 19th birthdays together; later Richard retrieves the faceless body of his friend after he is killed by a landmine. During his time off, Richard reads Capote, Hemingway, Maugham and a host of other literary icons. The author surrounds the teen with expressive imagery and scenes filled with breathless action, writing with enough detail to pull readers into this tension-filled world. After almost two years in the war, Richard becomes disconnected from his life in Los Angeles–he’s entranced by the constant adrenaline surge and wants to stay in Vietnam. Vidaurri weaves a bittersweet tale that leaves readers similarly enthralled.
A gripping account that will appeal to fiction-lovers and war historians alike.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4196-4858-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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