A skillful tale of an American’s trauma and expatriation.
A young Iraq War veteran tries to escape his past in Perry’s (More Beautiful Women, 2015, etc.) latest novel.
In 2008, 26-year-old Jesse McCallister is fresh from the battlefields of Iraq. Rather than returning to the Army for an ordered third tour, Jesse takes his share of the proceeds from the sale of his dead parents’ land and flees his native Texas for Europe. “He’d just wanted to go,” Perry writes, “and watch the flat horizons of the Iraqi desert and North Texas recede in his rear-view mirror.” In Switzerland, Jesse falls in love with a beautiful Italian waitress named Sonya and falls in with a crowd centered around a wealthy young American named Michael Barnes. Barnes helps Jesse acquire a new passport, literally and figuratively giving him the opportunity to choose a new identity for himself. Jesse and Sonya soon marry, and the newly formed group of friends wanders down to the French Riviera. While the immediate moment is filled with pleasure, Jesse can’t escape the traumas of combat in Ramadi. And Jesse is not the only one of these young people with a past to escape. The present itself becomes more troubled, as the group migrates to Côte d’Ivoire in Africa with charitable intentions. The dialogue in the novel is often less than believable—Jesse picks up Sonya with the line “You look like a pretty actress. Like someone in the movies.” Much more strongly developed is Jesse’s interior life. Perry deftly draws Jesse’s memories into the present. The novel resembles the post–World War I Lost Generation works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, most notably the latter’s The Sun Also Rises (which also features a character named Barnes). Aside from the appearance of modern elements like cellphones and credit cards, this story could almost take place 80 years earlier. The author effectively builds on his historical model while making it relevant to the key events of the contemporary era, such as the 2008 financial crisis and the Iraq War.
A skillful tale of an American’s trauma and expatriation.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 265
Publisher: Web Dispatches Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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