Though stretching credibility at times, Arvin makes a worthy and felt addition to retrospective WWII fiction.
A vividly told first novel about a WWII soldier who never quite understands what’s going on.
When the good but vacuous George Tilson arrives at Omaha Beach (the landings are over), he’s nicknamed “Heck” because that’s his strongest swear word. Heck is from Iowa, 18, and naive, and at once he begins somehow to fall between the cracks, waiting for an assignment that never comes, while others around him are sent off to the front. In scenes only half-believable, he wanders from camp, helps a little French kid who’s injured by a mine, ends up being seduced by the kid’s pretty sister Claire—and, spastically embarrassed, runs away before consummation. Finally attached to a unit and under a night artillery barrage—rivetingly described—Heck discovers that he’s a coward, huddles in his foxhole against orders, and gets separated from his unit. When he then gashes his leg in a fall before finding the others, he’s sent rearward—where, as the seriously wounded suffer and die, he once again somehow goes all but unnoticed. Wandering into town one day, he comes upon Claire’s father—who accuses him of having gotten Claire pregnant. Once again, Heck flees. He’s sent to a unit on harrowing wintertime forest duty, sees death, finds himself once again under heavy fire—and holds his arm up until a bullet pierces it, sending him rearward again. But a ranking fellow soldier sees what he does, and later, after more turns of events, takes the opportunity to punish Heck in an unusual, apropos, and fiercely trying way—one that will hold the reader breathless. Arvin (stories: In the Electric Eden, 2003) opens and closes with references to a real-life Private Eddie D. Slovik, shot for desertion in 1944. Heck’s poor story, subtly enveloped inside Slovik’s, becomes only the more lamentable and sad.
Though stretching credibility at times, Arvin makes a worthy and felt addition to retrospective WWII fiction.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-51277-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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