THE TIME KEEPERS

After the Vietnam War, a close-knit Long Island community reacts to outsiders in its midst.

As the popularity of Kristin Hannah’s The Women (2024) stokes renewed interest in fiction about the Vietnam War and its aftermath, Richman’s tenth novel examines the experience of a carefully drawn set of characters, inspired by true stories and extensive interviews. Anh and her 10-year-old nephew, Bảo, are the only members of their family to survive violent post-war repression and a perilous escape over the sea. Though they’ve been taken in by a community of Catholic sisters in the fictional town of Bellegrove, their adjustment is not smooth, and when we first meet Bảo, he’s run away from the Motherhouse and is sleeping on a sidewalk. This is where Grace, an Irish immigrant and survivor of tragedy herself, finds him; so begin her efforts to help the boy and his aunt. While her younger daughter, Molly, and her husband, Tom, are all for it, teenage Katie wants no part of the mission. “They have agencies that care for kids like that,” she tells her sister. Opposition also comes from Grace’s friend Adele, whose brother was killed in Vietnam; Grace wonders how Jack, a war veteran who works nights in Tom’s clock and watch repair shop, hiding his severely scarred face from the world, will react. Richman uses a rotating perspective to fill in the background that motivates each of these characters: Grace’s childhood tragedy and immigrant experience; Jack’s battlefield horrors and fierce reclusiveness; Anh’s profound losses. In an author’s note, Richman ties each of these storylines to its real-life inspiration, and even the modus operandi of a group of adolescent baddies seem partly inspired by a true Long Island crime of the period, the murder of 13-year-old John Pius in 1979.

This luminous novel continues the important work of remembering this period and learning its lessons.