CAPE HENRY HOUSE

A nostalgic debut novel chronicles the alcohol-fueled hijinks of a Navy man in his early 20s.

Bittick’s tale is a look back at a moment in a man’s life when he is “too old to be a kid and too young to be considered an adult.” The author’s narrator, Bosner, is a 21-year-old aviation maintenance worker in the Navy stationed far from home. His life boils down to working long hours fixing helicopters in the hangar, trying to make it to a local bar before last call, and then collapsing in the barracks before waking up and repeating the cycle. The best part of Bosner’s life—besides his beat-up jalopy, the Green Beater—is the camaraderie he shares with his gang of shipmates. When two of his friends, B-man and Dolvar, decide to move into a house with another shipmate and his wife, Bosner wonders whether two “consummate partiers” will be good roommates for a married couple. But he dismisses his concerns because of what the house will provide for the gang: a place to party away from the barracks. Bosner then describes three weekends of epic parties at the Cape Henry House, featuring falls on black ice, drunken sprints through neighbors’ yards, fights, beer pong, romance, and karaoke. After the gang discovers that some of its members will soon be sent abroad to support a ship’s deployment (and the married couple tell the hard-partying roommates to move out), the group throws one final Super Bowl Sunday blowout to bid the house farewell. Bittick clearly understands the nuances of Navy life, and his descriptions of barracks living and work in the hangars are vivid and captivating. Unfortunately, the tale focuses on the gang’s bashes at the Cape Henry House. Drunken fights and keg stands are neither interesting nor funny when the characters involved are as thinly drawn as the members of Bosner’s gang, who are basically interchangeable. The most fully developed players besides Bosner wisely do not spend much time at the Cape Henry House parties. The story suggests that it’s more fun to attend bashes than read about them.

An intriguing but uneven tale about a boisterous gang of shipmates.