A novel that tries to marry the internal conflict of Tim O'Brien to the novelist style of Nelson DeMille but can’t quite...
A Vietnam-era veteran recalls his childhood, leading up to a defining moment as a military policeman in Germany.
It's hard to tell whether author Ryan (Vaudeville in the Dark, 2010, etc.) is playing fast and loose with the truth in his sort-of war memoir. Ultimately, veracity doesn’t matter much for a story in which nothing much happens. The launch is intriguing—military policeman Rick Ryan is being threatened by soldiers loyal to Staff Sgt. Elija Perkins, who's been arrested by Ryan and his partner for bootlegging cigarettes. There's also the tease of a fatal denouement: “And then it hit me: what kind of a story did I have to tell? I’d never been in real combat, though maybe I’d killed someone.” From there, it’s a lot of flashbacks to a relatively idyllic childhood in Janesville, Wisconsin, and the occasional flash forward to a peaceful adulthood in the present day. Mostly it tells how Ryan got from Wisconsin to Germany, working his assignments while the Baader-Meinhof gang carries out their ultraviolence nearby. After consulting with draft resisters and failing to mutilate himself to get out of the war, Ryan enlists. He's trained as a military policeman and deployed in Germany under a diverse rogue’s gallery of commanders. Weird side note: He talks to Albert Speer in his dreams. The married but unfaithful Ryan also takes a lover who threatens him with retribution from her Baader-Meinhof friends, which kicks off that murky ending we mentioned earlier. The book’s difficulty comes in wanting to have it both ways, leaving it unconvincing as a thriller yet lacking the emotional depth to qualify as a cautionary tale.
A novel that tries to marry the internal conflict of Tim O'Brien to the novelist style of Nelson DeMille but can’t quite stick the landing.Pub Date: March 31, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-57962-385-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
