A moving and perceptive story about a man losing everything and finding a new life in Mexico.
In Brewer’s luminous novel, a vacationing couple in Mexico encounters much more than they expected.
Americans Bob and Kathy take a vacation in Mexico, seeing the sights and cavorting in the clear waters. Bob is an underwriter at Midland Mutual and Casualty Insurance Corporation (where Kathy is a secretary), and they use their time in Mexico as a refuge from the ugliness of Bob’s pending divorce from his wife, Carol. But that outside world interferes anyway when Bob learns that his divorce is going to gut him financially (“It’s the best deal you can possibly get,” he’s told). There’s low-key tension between Bob and Kathy—he constantly urges her to undertake tourist excursions as she tries to hold him back from his adventurous impulses—and as these conflicts grow more pronounced, Bob’s inner world begins to unravel as he starts to feel both desperately hopeless and strangely liberated. The quality of his thoughts changes, going from quotidian to cosmic: “Isn’t everyone a victim in the end, a sacrifice to sate the awful power that suffocates and drowns?” he wonders. “Who could escape it?” With judicious restraint, the author slowly and carefully conveys this personal change in Bob as the parti-colored oblivious world continues all around him. Key to his transformation is a 9-year-old boy named Tomcruise Chel Ochoa (his first name is the result of his mother, Dolores, christening him after the actor; his middle name is a reference to the Chel people, who are descendants of the Diving God, a figure from ancient Mayan mythology). Tomcruise wants Bob to teach him how to dive, and by steady measures, limned with deep sensitivity by Brewer, the boy draws Bob into his world and opens him to the possibility of a new life, “the chance to be better than he was and, for once, the chance to be of worth to someone—and to himself.” This story of personal reinvention is well crafted and often beautifully written, in the vein of Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene.
A moving and perceptive story about a man losing everything and finding a new life in Mexico.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2023
ISBN: 9798369405901
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Xlibris US
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: yesterday
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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