The combination of social satire with an intimate portrait of loss and grief is stylistically ambitious and deeply moving.
Having concentrated on one family in her first novel, then eschewed individual protagonists for a collective “we” in her second, Otsuka now blends the two approaches, shifting from an almost impersonal, wide-lens view of society to an increasingly narrow focus on a specific mother-daughter relationship.
The book begins as tart social comedy. A narrative “we” represents various swimmers frequenting an underground community pool. A microcosm of America, they remain mostly anonymous, although a few names are dropped in from time to time as a kind of punctuation. The swimmers are fleshed out as a group by multiple lists detailing a wide range of occupations and social roles, motivations to swim, swimming styles, and eventually reactions to a mysterious crack that appears suddenly on the pool floor. Initially dismissed as inconsequential by the experts, the crack morphs, Covid-like, into more and more cracks until panicky authorities announce the pool will close altogether. What seems a minor act of grace on the final day of operation—the lifeguard generously allows a memory-impaired woman named Alice to swim one extra lap—leaves the reader unprepared for the sharp swerve the novel now makes. Alice takes center stage, her cognitive and eventual physical deterioration viewed from multiple angles. The narrative voice is now addressing itself to "you," Alice’s daughter, a Japanese American novelist with an obvious resemblance to the author, observing Alice’s decline in slightly removed, writerly detail as Alice’s memories drift from random, repetitive, and oddly specific to more random, less frequent, and increasingly vague. Institutional care follows, with the new “we” of the narrative voice addressing Alice in cold bureaucratic lingo that represents the nursing facility in a snarky, predictable, and disappointingly un-nuanced sketch of institutional care. As Alice fades further, the daughter returns. She berates herself for the ways she failed her mother. But dredging up her own memories, she also begins to recognize the love her parents felt for each other and for her.
The combination of social satire with an intimate portrait of loss and grief is stylistically ambitious and deeply moving.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-32133-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
Still more brilliant escapism among Kwan’s 1 percenters. Too much is never enough.
Let us not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Or, maybe let’s.
In his second follow-up to the blockbuster Crazy Rich Asians trilogy, Kwan continues to wrap fairy-tale love stories in glitz, glamour, couture, fine art, and delicious wit. (It’s possible that the author is on a diet because the food component seems slightly less dominant than usual.) This time, our star-crossed lovers are Rufus Gresham, Viscount St. Ives, a man whose beauty has been driving women to distraction since he was photographed in his boxers ironing a dress shirt at age 16, and Eden Tong, a young doctor who lives with her widowed father on the family property at Greshamsbury Hall. Though Rufus has been madly in love and planning to marry Eden since childhood, he is about to run into a solid wall of opposition from his mother, Lady Arabella. Since she and Lord Gresham have managed to drain the family coffers, she is determined to save the family by having each of her three children marry serious money. But right from the start, when an active volcano interrupts the wedding of daughter Augusta to Scandinavian royalty, things don’t go her way. Often hilarious epigraphs and fourth-wall-breaking footnotes include this: “Founded in 1875 in Venice, Tessitura Luigi Bevilacqua was also the official supplier of precious fabrics to the Vatican until Pope Paul VI decided to tighten the belt on luxury goods. (This would explain the pillows from Target I saw in the waiting room during my last audience with the Pope.)” One also enjoys the gossip articles, invitations, and menus sprinkled through the text, and the little icons used to signal location changes—Hawaii hibiscus, London Big Ben, Greshamsbury tea set, Houston oil derrick, etc.—are adorable.
Still more brilliant escapism among Kwan’s 1 percenters. Too much is never enough.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9780385546294
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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