The inevitable finale to a messy, often absorbing saga about the evolution of the dispossessed.
The long, wild ride of France’s most unlikely lothario reaches its lurid climax.
For this third and concluding chapter in the series about the titular vagabond, it seems fitting that Despentes completes the cycle of grief by finally giving her eccentric ensemble a kind of acceptance and maybe even a little peace. As before, this is a sprawling cast of human pinballs, with dozens of characters careening in and out of each other’s lives, cataloged via a roster recounting each character’s current events. Perpetual sad sack Vernon is returning from exile as a changed man facing a very different Paris than he left: “Paris has become hard. Vernon is immediately aware of the pent-up aggression—people are furious, pressed up against each other, ready to come to blows.” In that respect, this entry is very much of its time, visiting its characters’ feverish day-to-day dramas but punctuated by real-life shockwaves, among them the Charlie Hebdo attack, the coordinated terrorist attacks that ended in the Bataclan massacre, and more personal losses like David Bowie. Vernon, meanwhile, has become the somewhat unreliable sage to a group of disciples as well as a popular DJ, dubbed the “shaman of the turntable.” Returning from the relatively safe commune where he and his friends were building a capitalism-free life, Vernon is faced with a dilemma when his old drinking buddy Charles dies, leaving him a fortune but no clue as to how to spend it. The meandering story is characteristically prolonged, but there’s something comforting in visiting each singular arc, be it coke addict Kiko searching for spiritual equilibrium, friends Aïcha and Céleste going underground after avenging the death of Aïcha’s mother, or Laurent Dopalet, the Harvey Weinstein doppelgänger, licking his wounds and plotting revenge. Perhaps it’s because no one here changes much, yet none are immune to the inevitable march of time. Life, in all its chaotic glory, goes on.
The inevitable finale to a messy, often absorbing saga about the evolution of the dispossessed.Pub Date: May 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-28326-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
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
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
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PERSPECTIVES
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