With melancholy imagination, Bergman elegantly tackles nothing less than the entire arc of human history.
A treatment that pauses aging and pain affects an entire city in unforeseen ways in this debut novel.
Maeve Wilhelm is asleep. She’s been asleep for 25 years, since she nearly drowned in a community swimming pool at the age of 8. But Maeve’s sleep is not a coma: She’s breathing on her own and, more importantly, not visibly aging. Hers isn’t the first family tragedy: Maeve’s mother, Naomi, a senior researcher at a biotech company, also drowned under strange circumstances. Naomi’s body was found with a mysterious red rock in her pocket, apparently related to the red algae bloom that appeared off a private beach where her company was conducting top-secret research. This rock, this algae—what does it have to do with Naomi’s death or Maeve’s sleep, which occurred not long after she ingested some of the algae at the closed beach on a dare? How does it connect to Naomi’s biotech work on a procedure designed to pause outward signs of aging as well as numb pain? And what of the Museum of Human History, a local attraction built around caves in which ancient humans—and a single doll, “in a sleeping posture…covered in beautiful red stones”—had once been discovered? Bergman’s novel, structured like a series of concentric circles, ripples out to include a number of characters affected by the anti-aging treatment in some way: a young widower, a performance artist, a museum director, and Maeve’s own identical twin. Each narrative ring reveals unexpected connections among them, images and bits of language that recur, ideas and themes—memory, death, the slippage between the past and the future—that deepen as the novel blends fairy tale, philosophy, and shades of literary-futurist classics like Never Let Me Go.
With melancholy imagination, Bergman elegantly tackles nothing less than the entire arc of human history.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781953534910
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
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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