An overdetermined novel that can’t quite decide what notes it wants to strike.
The coming-of-age of a blue-skinned girl.
Cypher’s debut has quite a few moving parts: On the one hand, her narrator, Betty, is trying to reckon with her Palestinian American family’s complicated history; on the other hand, Betty has blue skin. Another story thread has this queer narrator trying to decide whether or not to follow her partner around the world. Cypher doesn’t seem to know exactly what novel she wanted to write—as a result, this book feels like several different stories smashed awkwardly together. The most interesting parts follow Betty’s closeted queer aunt from Palestine to the U.S. as Betty tries to reckon with her own sexuality. But the fact of Betty’s blue skin (“the pure cobalt of a gas flame,” in Cypher’s words) distracts from all that. Ultimately, it’s unclear why Cypher bothered to veer into this magical realm. Betty’s blue skin and a few other unreal details are not only unbelievable from the standpoint of our world; they don’t really cohere even in Cypher’s own invented universe. Yet another thread, about Betty’s mother’s mental illness and her complicated relationship with Betty’s father, is never fully explored. Then, too, Cypher’s syntax frequently becomes tangled in a way that seems to strive toward lyricism though it ends up simply opaque. “It’s for the philosophers,” Cypher writes, “whether two people can live in the exact same place if that place is imaginary—or maybe a poet could tell me whether any set of words is sturdy enough, on its own, to duplicate an experience from one mind to the next.” Cypher can certainly be commended for her willingness to experiment in her fiction. Here’s hoping that, in her next work, she doesn’t forget the simple art of storytelling.
An overdetermined novel that can’t quite decide what notes it wants to strike.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9780593499535
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
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
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
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