A mesmerizing conspiracy tale that’s entertaining and thoughtful.A mesmerizing conspiracy tale that’s entertaining and...
In this novel, three caretakers try to conceal the death of their long-standing patient in order to keep their jobs.
Once Maj. Roger Thorndike suffers a stroke, he’s surrounded by multiple shifts of home attendants. A lonely widower, he enjoys the company of his caretakers and often flirts with them enthusiastically despite his diminished condition. The women, especially Loretta Hardwick, take to him with affectionate fondness, but they also rely on him for their livelihoods. He pays particularly well for Sinkhole County, West Virginia, a place whose name accurately sums up its economic prospects, an example of Clearman’s delightfully cheeky gamesomeness. One day, the major jokingly encourages Loretta to replace him with a local, Lyle Dunbar, an older, largely mute man who bears a striking resemblance to him. Once the major dies, Loretta decides to take that offer seriously and convinces the two caretakers who share her shift, Tammy Oakes and Cass Furrow, to join her in the subterfuge. Loretta makes this morbid proposal with a certain innocent tenderness: “If he don’t die, we still have our jobs. His kids don’t have to stress, we just carry on like we’ve been doing. Everybody’s happy.” But keeping a secret, especially one so extraordinary, is a tall order, and the major’s son, Hume, quickly discovers that the man he visited at his birth home is not his father. To further complicate things, as well as make matters even funnier, a disgruntled nurse named Trisha Vance, let go by Ruth Blitzer, the major’s daughter, gets wind of the conspiracy. Trish is more than happy to leverage that knowledge to her own advantage.
Clearman’s portrayal of the caretakers, in particular Loretta, is marvelously nuanced—these are women with bills to pay, facing the “threat of destitution,” who have a genuine devotion to the major. Cass, hilariously, teaches a course in medical ethics at a local community college, and is relatively quick to acquiesce to Loretta’s mad plan. Hume is also moved by a complex dynamic of motivations. He’s sad that his father died without his family around him, but he’s also relieved that the major’s incessant cascade of catastrophes is finally coming to an end. Hume has this thought when he realizes that, though his father is presumably alive, someone has just been buried next to his mother: “The fresh grave. The false Major. His grief mingled alarmingly with relief. His father was so much better off dead. The last four years had been a slow, grim descent into misery. Roger’s suffering, anger, delusion, and his loss after loss after loss.” While it’s predictably inevitable that word will get out that the major is actually dead, this obvious fact never undermines the plot. In fact, the stark impossibility of Loretta’s gambit is part of the book’s farcical strength. This is an impressively subtle novel—brimming with comedic sharpness, but also a sweet but unsentimental glimpse into the strange ways love expresses itself in the real world.
A mesmerizing conspiracy tale that’s entertaining and thoughtful.A mesmerizing conspiracy tale that’s entertaining and thoughtful.vel, entertaining and thoughtful.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9798988023418
Page Count: 270
Publisher: New Meridian Arts
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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