An essential entry in this exceptional writer’s corpus.
This reissue of the Australian writer’s first novel suggests the seeds of his peculiar style as he describes a boy’s early life.
Nine-year-old Clement Killeaton looks at the new 1948 calendar in his kitchen, with its picture of Jesus and his parents during their flight from Bethlehem to Egypt. Clement and his parents live in Bassett, near Melbourne, the two Australian cities that pretty much mark the extent of their travels. In this debut, first published in 1974, Murnane establishes motifs that will recur in subsequent work, including Catholicism; horse racing; the effects of different landscapes; the play of light, especially through colored glass; and the play of perception and ideas through the mind. What little plot the book has concerns the efforts of Clement’s father to repeat the big win he had with a horse he trained. Gambling, borrowing money, and tensions over debt pervade the Killeaton household. Elsewhere, the narrative follows Clement, a clever loner who creates miniature racetracks and farms in his backyard, prepares elaborate horse races using marbles, copes with bullies, and tries to learn about sex from schoolgirls who generally delight in deflecting his efforts. Murnane is skilled at closely observed scenes and quite funny at times, but he will likely frustrate readers looking for conventional fiction. The chief pleasures here are his departures from convention, eccentricities of tone and diction, and flights of fancy, all trademarks of his later fiction. In one example, Clement is studying the light coming through his front door’s green-gold glass panel when the narration takes off for two pages of long, complex sentences about colorful creatures and oddly shaped cities and great journeys. It’s a glimpse of the writer finding his own path and an esthetic springboard in the parsing of the ripples and riffs of a boy’s imagination when not waylaid by sex and saints and bullies.
An essential entry in this exceptional writer’s corpus.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-91150-836-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: And Other Stories
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
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
SEEN & HEARD
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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