A moving first effort that starkly examines the scars of war on its unwitting pawns.
A memorable debut novel about a life colored by regret and grasping for redemption.
Horn capably tells this poignant story through the memories of Eden Cain, a Vietnam veteran haunted by war atrocities in which he unwillingly participated in secret incursions into Laos under orders from President Richard Nixon. More than 30 years later, Eden lives as an Iowa farmer with Elizabeth, the wife he loves. Theirs is a relationship that focuses on the present and the future, not their pasts: “After twenty nine years of marriage, neither of them truly knew the other….Their pasts were inviolable, a sacredness that each respected.” Life would be perfect if not for the guilt he harbors—a heartbreaking reality not uncommon to sufferers of PTSD. The former helicopter tail gunner tries to forget, but “[w]hat broke him was the awareness that he would never outlive the memory of Vietnam. No amount of distraction, pleasure or hardship could bury those scattered moments that had changed his life.” His bucolic solitude is shattered, however, when he’s subpoenaed to testify before Congress about the Laos missions amid a political scandal: “How could an insignificant person like himself be needed to rewrite history?” Eden’s was a satisfying if not standout life that, unfortunately, was built on a lie of omission, one about to fall apart thanks to unscrupulous politicians half a country away. Horn, a Vietnam vet, expertly draws readers into the main settings, shifting seamlessly among three time periods—Eden’s years in country, his return to an unwelcoming nation and his courting of Elizabeth, and the present—as he paints the complex picture that has led to Eden’s simple existence and current dilemma.
A moving first effort that starkly examines the scars of war on its unwitting pawns.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9835894-3-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Granite Peak Press
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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