Duty and desire clash in the melancholy reminiscences of a former Ellis Island immigration officer.
A man looks back on his long tenure at America’s former entry point.
Already the winner of the European Union Prize for Literature after its publication in France, Josse’s slim novel contains the somber reflections, in diary form, of one man’s 45 years of service as a gatekeeper at what once was the door into the United States for millions of immigrants. John Mitchell, who began working for the Federal Immigration Service at Ellis Island as an immigration inspector and eventually rises to the position of commissioner, finds himself the only remaining employee at the deserted complex, but the ghosts of its many temporary inhabitants and his former colleagues remain intensely real. Nine days before its closure on Nov. 12, 1954, he sits down to record his memories—mostly painful and deeply regretful—of his long tenure. In spare, but at times poetic, prose, Mitchell describes his brief, almost impossibly happy marriage to his late wife, Liz, a nurse who also worked on the island. Mitchell is a man of orderly habits and obvious rectitude, but he’s haunted as he recalls the stories of several immigrants, all of them cases in which he’s guilty of serious, but totally human, lapses in judgment. The most troubling involves Nella, a beautiful young woman from Sardinia, who arrives with her younger brother, Paolo. After Paolo is marked for exclusion because of a mental deficiency, Mitchell allows his emotions to overcome his professional obligations in his relationship with Nella. When he permits, against his better judgment, another Italian immigrant with an anarchist past into the country, Mitchell overcompensates during the Red Scare of the 1920s by excluding a couple from Hungary with vaguely communist leanings. In the tale of this fictional bureaucrat, Josse powerfully evokes the spirit of the “huddled masses” who landed on America’s shores while creating a memorable portrait of a man torn between his commitment to his difficult job and the longings of his heart.
Duty and desire clash in the melancholy reminiscences of a former Ellis Island immigration officer.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64286-071-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: World Editions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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