A remarkable, unusually rewarding work.
An obsession with Herman Melville emerges amid pandemic lockdown.
It’s not immediately clear why the book opens with the narrator’s husband saying to her: “Bon voyage.” She calls it an “edict inside a valediction,” suggesting that these are people who enjoy words and wordplay. And irony. For this is the time of the pandemic. The couple are academics stuck at home with their two daughters, but the narrator has embarked on a research project concerning Herman Melville. A desk-chair traveler, she roams through scholarship, criticism, fans’ notes, and ephemera, presenting facts, coincidences, and insights in mostly short, one-sentence paragraphs that form a kind of enchiridion of Melvilleana, reflecting an obsession with Herman not unlike Ahab’s with Moby. At the same time, the narrator sparingly provides glimpses of her home life and marriage, moments of domestic ease or of uncertainty, hints of past discord, like “the Bad Time.” The narrator’s Hermania should engage book lovers, as she collects and connects facts about Melville and references from his biographers and other writers—E.M. Forster, Walker Percy, William Gaddis, Marilynne Robinson, Lauren Groff et al.—in a way that points up the delights of literary trawling. Elizabeth Hardwick’s short life of Melville and his marriage are tied to Hardwick’s rocky union with Robert Lowell as well as Melville’s intense friendship with Hawthorne. The toll that creativity can take on partnerships is a pervasive theme. The authors themselves are husband and wife. Bachelder was a National Book Award finalist for his 2016 novel, The Throwback Special. Habel won the Iowa Poetry Prize for her 2020 collection, The Book of Jane. Some autobiographical points are evident, but what may be more revealing is the tonal consistency of this collaboration and the sense of creative pleasure that went into making it.
A remarkable, unusually rewarding work.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781324065401
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.
An acclaimed novelist revisits the central characters of his best-known work.
At the end of Brooklyn (2009), Eilis Lacey departed Ireland for the second and final time—headed back to New York and the Italian American husband she had secretly married after first traveling there for work. In her hometown of Enniscorthy, she left behind Jim Farrell, a young man she’d fallen in love with during her visit, and the inevitable gossip about her conduct. Tóibín’s 11th novel introduces readers to Eilis 20 years later, in 1976, still married to Tony Fiorello and living in the titular suburbia with their two teenage children. But Eilis’ seemingly placid existence is disturbed when a stranger confronts her, accusing Tony of having an affair with his wife—now pregnant—and threatening to leave the baby on their doorstep. “She’d known men like this in Ireland,” Tóibín writes. “Should one of them discover that their wife had been unfaithful and was pregnant as a result, they would not have the baby in the house.” This shock sends Eilis back to Enniscorthy for a visit—or perhaps a longer stay. (Eilis’ motives are as inscrutable as ever, even to herself.) She finds the never-married Jim managing his late father’s pub; unbeknownst to Eilis (and the town), he’s become involved with her widowed friend Nancy, who struggles to maintain the family chip shop. Eilis herself appears different to her old friends: “Something had happened to her in America,” Nancy concludes. Although the novel begins with a soap-operatic confrontation—and ends with a dramatic denouement, as Eilis’ fate is determined in a plot twist worthy of Edith Wharton—the author is a master of quiet, restrained prose, calmly observing the mores and mindsets of provincial Ireland, not much changed from the 1950s.
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781476785110
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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