A fragmentary and arduous but ultimately potent tale of good and evil.
In O’Fuel’s novel, a cop with familial baggage and personal hang-ups comes to see urban American policing in a new light.
Sean Tower is the most recent in a family line of police officers working for “the force” (often italicized in the third-person narration). His grandfather Billy Tower had been something of a legend in the precinct, and his own father, Kelly, had continued his tradition by adopting the same brutal “violence cure[s] violence” philosophy. However, when Sean, as an impressionable youth, witnesses his dad assaulting Rocket Davies, a mentally unstable, lightning-damaged menace in their neighborhood, the young man’s psychology undergoes a fundamental shift—he becomes pathologically incapable of lying, a trait that’s both a blessing and a curse for this future officer of the law. On joining the force, he finds himself both lionized for his family background and vilified for his ethics. He dwells in a world of law enforcers who are arguably more corrupt and dangerous than the criminals they encounter—cops who murder an innocent man after entering the wrong home, who shoot anxious children, who pimp out underage girls to other cops, and who leave a disembodied head on a sidewalk for an hour for their own amusement. Sean is, inevitably, gradually worn down by the immorality, but when his best friend dies in an apparent domestic incident, his way of looking at the world changes once again.
This is a violent, relentless, and angry study of police violence and community tensions in urban America. The writing is often superb, dodging clichés and establishing a voice that’s at once authentic and literate. O’Fuel has taken the curious step of eschewing dialogue altogether in the first half and introducing it subtly in later stages. This decision, coupled with a rapidly shifting montage of vignettes, makes the long opening chapter feel disorienting and detached, as though readers are eavesdropping on anecdotes at a dinner party. The narrative’s frequent temporal leaps and episodic nature don’t make for a light reading experience, and keeping track of characters and piecing together the chronology will be strenuous for even the most attentive reader. The broader plot arc does reveal itself over time, but it demands a good deal of patience before it becomes truly rewarding. The initial shortage of dialogue, however, is, in some ways, a successful experiment—it’s surprising how one doesn’t miss it—but equally, it strips the cast of some much-needed humanity. One receives a huge amount of detailed information about key players, but the lack of dialogue means that one never really gets to know them on a deeper level. O’Fuel seem to be going for a William Faulkner–meets–George Pelecanos vibe, and, in some respects, he pulls it off. The same sense of gradually dawning realization that runs through The Sound and the Fury and the TV show The Wire is evident here, and although O’Fuel’s book falls short of those landmarks, it’s still a satisfying experience—and one that’s well worth the effort.
A fragmentary and arduous but ultimately potent tale of good and evil.Pub Date: May 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-578-60550-0
Page Count: 568
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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