An unsettling, roving novel about trauma and soldiering.
Singley’s (The Bali Hai Enchantment Spa Murders, 2017, etc.) Vietnam War novel follows five soldiers at different points in the service cycle.
Spc. Jimmy Hogan—who received the nickname “Jungle Jimmy” for shooting a young, possibly unarmed Vietnamese man while relieving himself outdoors—is 10 months into his tour as part of an airborne infantry company, currently stationed near Tam Ky. His best friend, Cpl. Thomas Gaylord, is at a military hospital in Japan, where he’s recuperating from a grenade injury that cost him his hand. 1st Lt. Harry “Pineapple” Papeeko, whose feelings are increasingly turning against the war, is also hospitalized—but he’s back home in Hawaii, recovering from mental trauma. Former Spc. Jay Jager has gone home to West Virginia, where he was once persuaded by a judge to join the Army after he committed a violent crime. Pfc. Chris “Cherry” Scott is also stationed near Tam Ky, and he’s still seen as “the new guy” even though he’s seen combat; he’s also pining for his girlfriend back in Los Angeles. Each man bears the psychological scars of deployment, brought on by the constant fear of death and the repetitive counting of days until the end of a tour. Looming largest in their lives is an attack that happened on Mother’s Day—a day when everything went wrong and which forever shaped each man’s experiences of the war and all that came after. Singley’s prose is frank and wonderfully marbled with specificity, capturing the panicked tension that ticks away within each character: “Home was unreal, an anchor to the past, a place to be secure. Reality was here, in this black moment before dawn, reality was his damp fatigues and the stars slowly vanishing.” The book also has an episodic feel as the narration jumps from man to man, slowly revealing the connections that exist between them. It’s a purposefully unpleasant read at times—the racism, misogyny, violence, and general misanthropy of the soldiers are frequent and disturbing—but this fits in honestly with other books in its genre.
An unsettling, roving novel about trauma and soldiering.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5320-6415-9
Page Count: 286
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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