Just stunning.
A Black army vet working as a hospital technician reflects on his life.
Joseph Thomas, the narrator of Thomas’ debut novel, is having a tough shift, but that’s nothing new. An emergency department tech and nurse’s aide, Joseph begins his story with a litany of patients waiting for care in his Philadelphia trauma center, from a young boy with a wound from an AK-47 to a savagely beaten homeless man. Joseph rushes from one patient to another, being slowly driven mad by hunger; his friend Ray, whom he met while they were preparing to deploy to Iraq, is supposed to bring him a hoagie and an Otis Spunkmeyer chocolate chip muffin but hasn’t yet materialized. In a futile bid to distract himself, Joseph contemplates his upcoming trip to Belize with a co-worker, one of several with whom he is sexually entangled. Throughout the novel, Joseph expounds on his complicated personal life—he has children with three different women; his mother, who’s spent time in prison, has a crack problem; and he’s juggling work with graduate school, where he’s writing his dissertation. He’s also frustrated with the arc of his life: “The past nineteen years of day-in day-out grinding hadn’t meant shit because with my own mistakes and failures, the world, and a set of increasing desires for nice things combined I was basically back at square one.” Thomas’ stream-of-consciousness writing is superb, and well suited to the frustrated anger that his protagonist is plagued by: His fury, he says, “is composed, in part, by the material conditions of people’s lives and in part by starvation. It doesn’t help that I know so many of these people, either by blood relation or the repeated offenses of being ill, which are really just the repeat offenses of being poor, which is correlated too strongly with being not white, though in this world, in this country, in this neighborhood especially, with being black.” This is an astonishingly accomplished novel, often funny, often tragic, one that longs for, as Joseph puts it, “that necessary love, that forceful love, that elegant and deeply painful love otherwise foreclosed to us by the world.”
Just stunning.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9781538740989
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: yesterday
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
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
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PERSPECTIVES
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