Science-fiction writer Haldeman (Worlds Enough and Time, 1992, etc.) unsuccessfully grinds a big political ax on too small a stone, in a novel about the traumas of the Vietnam War—also the subject of his first non-sf novel, The War, in 1972. Spider begins his Vietnam tour as a clerk in Graves Registration, but is soon sent to the jungles. He carries a rifle that doesn't work, has no real friends, and little control over his life. Not surprisingly, he expects to die in Vietnam, while, back home, girlfriend Beverly struggles against an increasingly repressive society. Her letters to Spider try to mask both the political tenor of the country and her rejection of their former life together. Meanwhile, Spider begins to doubt his own sanity. The only survivor when his squad is wiped out, this young soldier is physically unharmed, but his mind is broken. He's sent stateside, to a psychiatric unit at Walter Reed Hospital, where he's not so much cured as experimented upon. Once released, Spider returns home to Bethesda, Maryland, and enrolls in college. But all his attempts at living a normal life fail, since he's suffering from post-traumatic shock syndrome. Spider tries, but he's unable to reconnect with Beverly, who by now is moving around the country and protesting the war. Throughout, Spider and Beverly take a psychological beating, although they do find some small redemptions (Spider in his music and newfound friends, Beverly in being briefly reunited with her mother). No such luck, however, for the reader, since the story has long since disintegrated—beginning about a third of the way in—under the weight of polemics (the military is bad, the government is bad, people are bad, etc.) and undeveloped characters. You'd like to feel for Spider, but every time you begin to, Haldeman wades in with a heavy-handed aside, destroying the novel's rhythm and integrity. With surprisingly scant tension given the subject matter, Haldeman, himself awarded a Purple Heart in Vietnam, offers too much political treatise and too little below the surface of his characters' lives.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-688-09023-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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