A harrowing work that conveys chaos, confusion and raw fear.
Eck’s debut follows a group of American GIs who are left behind in enemy territory and must find their way back.
In an unnamed, presumably African city occupied by the U.S. Army, a group of six soldiers are left behind while guarding their unit. Each has a battle partner: Heath and Fizer; Santiago and Zeller; and Cooper and the narrator, Josh Stanz. Josh and Cooper are the quiet members of the group. Cooper, a native of the occupied country who fled to America as a child with his grandparents after his parents had been murdered, is known throughout the unit for being a religious virgin devoted to a girl at home. Josh is more introspective, cursed with a nervous stomach, an active guilty conscience and a fervent desire to get home safely and make it to college. While on guard, Santiago and Zeller open fire on a group in the building, who turn out to be unarmed children. Justifiably fearing retribution, the group moves, but not before Cooper is shot by enemy fire. Cooper’s death is poignantly unceremonious and unsentimental, as is most of the novel. The soldiers debate about his remains and use his food and water, and all are forced to accept the loss with little emotion. The soldiers continue to move, occasionally linking up with locals for various purposes (in Santiago and Zeller’s cases, usually casual sex). Josh finds a brief kinship with a man named Michael, and in one conversation, they illuminate the mysteries of modern warfare—is it possible, as Josh claims, that America is actually losing lives in, and taking lives from, this country to be of help? Eventually, after collecting countless physical and emotional wounds and nearly succumbing to hunger and dehydration, the group is reunited with their compatriots, which is when they learn that they have only just been listed as missing. In such novels as The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien perfected the art of nuanced war fiction. Eck follows in his footsteps, emphasizing not the drama of the soldier’s ordeal, but the painstaking, spirit-breaking, heart-wrenching details.
A harrowing work that conveys chaos, confusion and raw fear.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-57131-057-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
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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