Ambitious, perspicacious, and humane.
Nathan’s novel begins as the story of a semicloseted gay screenwriter in 1950s Hollywood, but the scope grows to encompass issues of identity, social mores, and the survival of humankind.
The dense first 100 pages recount a 1956 turning point in George Curtis’ life. Aware of his otherness, the gay, Hungarian-born Jewish émigré tries to keep a low profile, away from the Hollywood limelight. Then the Hungarian uprising against the USSR compels him to write a serious political/philosophical essay. Leaving his studio job scripting B movies, he takes refuge at the glamorous mansion of a married but sexually predatory pair of movie stars. George’s sardonic wit—tinged with nostalgia, loneliness, and loss—sets a moody noir tone as drugs, sex, and Cold War paranoia of nuclear dimensions rock his previously buttoned-up life. Suddenly the narration shifts to New York City in 1944. Sixteen-year-old George arrives as a parentless refugee. The roots of his adult tendencies—his capacity to reinvent himself as needed, the double life he maintains as a homosexual, his fear of his capacity for deep affection, his (or the author’s) tendency to pontificate about concepts like the ethics of destruction—become evident, and readers realize with surprise that the George who was so apparently jaded in California was not yet 30 years old. Poor and uneducated, adolescent George thrusts himself into Manhattan’s bohemian world of artists and writers. He thrives until a combination of misfortunes, including a tragic love affair, forces his escape to California. Now hopscotching past California, the narration picks up in late-20th-century Paris, where 40-year-old George has moved and, for a while, achieved a satisfying life. Though George struggles as a gay man and an immigrant, the message here is that the fear of loneliness and annihilation are universal and existential while happiness and love, however fleeting, are available to all.
Ambitious, perspicacious, and humane.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781640096240
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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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