A brief, powerful historical novel that reflects on the beauty and brutality of life in wartime.
In this gripping novel, Paul (Nothing is Strange with You, 2008) chronicles bloody Civil War battles fought by the 95th Pennsylvania regiment.
As the novel opens in May 1864, the 95th Pennsylvania Volunteers have dwindled from the infamous “Original Twenty-Five” to just 12. These young men, encamped in Virginia, introduce themselves in an opening sequence that relies on formulaic descriptions (“a twenty-two-year-old typesetter and aspiring journalist from Philadelphia”) but benefits from rollicking dialogue (“Oh, I’ll tell you about it soon.” “When? When we’re all dead and buried?”). Although Paul includes real-life historical figures in the story, such as Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, he invented these dozen major characters. As the soldiers each discuss heroism and self-abnegation, they develop distinctive personalities. Their tone is often one of philosophical resignation—when “[g]ood men get killed every day,” “it ain’t always important whether you live or die,” one insists—but some soldiers are also devout religious believers, praying for God’s mercy for themselves and the Confederates. Paul effectively recreates the atmosphere of wearisome marches and gory warfare, and his combat scenes are matter-of-fact and graphic: There are gunshot and bayonet wounds but also crushed testicles and teeth-torn throats—as well as an unexpected erection in a scene of uncomfortably sexualized violence. The narrative often shifts to a single character’s perspective, only to have him suddenly shot to death. Such unsentimental bluntness, however, contrasts with Paul’s overall concern for his characters’ psychological back stories; Abbot, for instance, longs to join an English theater troupe, while Greisler is terrified of fire. The novel’s finest chapter details a wounded soldier’s struggle to escape an eerie forest and rejoin the company, and it balances irony and tragedy perfectly, juxtaposing tender flashbacks of the soldier’s prewar life against the blood-soaked present. As the novel concludes, with just a “quartet of survivors” remaining to parade through Philadelphia, the sadness is tempered by the prospect of new life ahead: “[Babcock] resumed walking forward—or backward—or sideways, or up and down—into what looked like the future.” Paul’s canvas may be limited in this novel, but his talent could easily sustain future works of epic historical fiction.
A brief, powerful historical novel that reflects on the beauty and brutality of life in wartime.Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4936-9582-9
Page Count: 164
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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
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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