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IMPEACH MY BUSH

FLESH FRICTION FOR THE AGENT TURNIP

A timely patchwork of fictional bits and pieces that lands few punches.

A compact collection offers fictional vignettes.

The subtitle of this work hints at the form of flash fiction, which is characterized by brevity— usually 100 to 200 words grouped around a pithy hook or twist. Regardless of what the “Flesh Friction” mentioned in that subtitle means (it’s never made clear), the book’s contents reflect the elements of flash fiction. This is a compilation of two dozen or so quick dramatic bits, usually well under a page in length, with the whole book being only a few dozen pages long. Two other features found in flash fiction—slangy delivery and a tendency to sprinkle in sexual references—are likewise present in many of these miniature chapters. Readers should expect explicit sexual references and racial epithets. Throughout these stories, the author invokes figures from the current news cycle—Bill Gates, Betsy DeVos, Kanye West, Donald Trump—and employs plenty of attempts at humor in order to make each vignette snappy and readable. Readers are clearly expected to be already familiar with American politics and culture. McGrouchpants admirably tackles a wide range of provocative subjects and offers some amusing tidbits here. But even knowledgeable readers will sometimes be at a loss since the author frequently lapses into incoherent babbling, as in “Why Big Pharma and Sociopathic Sex Advice-Givers are Shoveling Dirt Over Generation X’ers and Wilhelm Reich’s Graves” and other tales. A postscript to “ ‘FAMILY TIES’ and ‘GROWING PAINS’ Re-Runs Are Reality!” tells readers: “P.S. Try The Marx-Engels Reader, The Federalist Papers, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, The Interpretation of Dreams, and Trotsky’s The Russian Revolution (Abridged)…or, shut up! Shoot pool”—with the whimsicality obviously intended to be offbeat and cynical. Yet the result often reads like a slightly protracted and extremely disjointed series of in-jokes that fall flat, rendered in prose that’s jumpy and sneering rather than sharp and funny. Even flash fiction fans will likely be disappointed.

A timely patchwork of fictional bits and pieces that lands few punches.

Pub Date: June 9, 2017

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 41

Publisher: Self

Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2021

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THE WOMEN

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

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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

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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