July, July

Not one reviewer yet gave this book five stars, I am. That is not to suggest that it is a masterpiece or even O'Brien's best novel, rather, it is an excellent read, and to me, that is sufficient to regard it in high esteem. As every generation ages, it faces the irony, bitterness and self doubt over life's decisions. Few of us are spared looking in the bathroom mirror, at age 50, and wondering how we got to this point in our life and how different it might have been had we made choices other than the ones we made. Yet, few of us articulate those thoughts to anyone other than that image in the mirror.O'Brien's sharply drawn characters articulate that self doubt for us. If you have ever been to a class reunion, you will recognize the sentiment, desolation, guilt and perpetual hope that burns in all our hearts and in the souls of those we grew up with. Funny that the Baby Boomer Generation that now runs the world has created an age of irony for itself. O'Brien hits the bulls-eye.

When Tim O'Brien postponed graduate work at Harvard to serve in Vietnam, surely, he had no idea that he would one day become America's preeminent chronicler of those war years and garner a National Book Award. His prose is both brilliant and courageous. With the funny and poignant "July, July" O'Brien returns to the era that so shapes his writing, but this time rather than focusing on the soldiers he spotlights those who were left behind. When asked about his emphasis on female characters in his latest work, the author replied, "....in part it was a technical challenge, to prove to myself that I could do it, that as a writer I could portray convincing, detailed, intelligent, compelling women. More important, it seemed to me that most of the fiction set in the watershed era of the late 1960s focuses on stories about men - the pressures of war, draft-dodging, and so on. But for every man who went to Vietnam, or for every man who went to Canada, there were countless sisters and girlfriends and wives and mothers, each of whom had her own fascinating story, her own tragedies and suffering, her own healing afterward....." With "July, July" we meet many of these women at the thirtieth reunion of Minnesota's Darton Hall College class of 1969. Ten old friends meet again for a weekend in July to reminisce, drink, and rue what might have been Much has happened in the past three decades; , careers have flourished and floundered, children have been born, and marriages made in heaven have ended in hell. It seems fitting that Jan Huebner and Amy Robinson toast their exes with vodka and hope for better days. Dorothy Stier, a wealthy Reagan Republican is recovering from a radical mastectomy and her 30-year-old decision to let draft dodger Billy McMann wend his way to Winnipeg alone. Even with two husbands Spook Spinelli is still on the prowl and sets her failing sight on a tubby rich man with a weak heart. Other riveting characters charm and disarm, while Johnny Ever, perhaps an angel, always hovers. He is there to {pick} consciences and remind, as O'Brien has said, "I'm not sure if Johnny is an angel or a devil or a voice of conscience or just a weird metaphysical middleman. But yes, Johnny is meant to lift the story out of time, to remind both the characters and the reader that human beings have gone through certain universal troubles and joys throughout history, and to remind us of those abiding mysteries and unknown that envelop all of human experience." Tim O'Brien has crafted an incandescent novel penned with astounding insight and unforgettable power. - Gail Cooke

Tim O'Brien has done it again! In July, July, O'Brien creates a beautiful range of voices and lives, trapped by their own passions, hopes and the delusions of a generation, whose youth has run itself, nearly, out of gas. At a high school reunion, we see O'Brien's characters dance under cardboard stars in an awkward celebration of times past. The reunion of old friends serves as a catalyst for reliving the year of their college graduation: 1969. The narrative fluxes between present time stories and the tales of old hopes, dreams, loves and lives of these ripened graduates. In the novel, O'Brien's characters (some of whom, like Spoke Spenelli, remain as sassy and sexy as ever, while others find themselves victims of divorce, broken hearts, or a lost leg to the Vietnam War) are as real as each of us, as they explore who they were and who they have become. In July, July the reader finds herself out on their dance floor, amongst the crowd, dancing along with nostalgia. By brilliantly weaving the experiences of these characters lives, O'Brien creates a chorus for a generation who drowned themselves in the sea of cul-de-sacs, housing developments, golf courses and other landmarks of suburban culture. There is no book that better exemplifies the dreams of a generation, so proud and young and hopeful, who lost its innocence to a time of war. This book has moments of pure hilarity and heart wrenching sadness. It is a reflection of another "coming of age," middle age, that leaves the reader walking away with her own reflections on who she is and who she thought she would become. O'Brien is masterful in his prose. In July, July the cast of characters develop a plotline that wraps each of their lives around your very own. An amazing feat. My highest recommendation.

I loved the review from dannyj999, the 18-year-old, who suggested that 50-somethings might like this book more than he did. As an exact cohort of Tim O'Brien, I wondered myself as I read July, July, understanding every aspect of O'Brien's frame of reference, whether readers outside the Vietnam generation would find much of interest here. In the early going, the book filled me with desperation. Our generation suddenly seemed so old and irrelevant. Then again, what do you expect from a college reunion? But by the end O'Brien rescued several characters from the scrapheap, and left the reader -- this reader anyway -- with a needed sense of redemption. He's a master weaver by now, a terrific story-teller, full of dark humor.I'm always curious about the place of the Vietnam War in O'Brien's novels. This one doesn't disappoint. As we stand on the brink of more warfare, July, July did give me a momentary chill as I pondered whether today's Cheneys and Powells were the McNamaras and Bundys of 1962. Two thumbs up.

Tim O'Brien has accomplished something wrenching and exquisite in "July, July." Yes, it's amusing and heartrending. But it is more than a clever account of the sixties generation, or the collected inner life of an unsatisfied cohort, or a literary work parading mellifluous skill at saying everything with few words. In the company of Minnesota's Darton Hall College class of 1969, O'Brien has added texture to middle age and the peculiar power of distant memories to transform reality into fantasy, futility into hope, and loss into longing. Or visa versa.This is more than a reading experience, as if an escape to somewhere else. Here's what does happen: Memories rise into awareness triggered by ancient unrequited love, a crass dismissal, a flippant comment, or a hormone hurried glance. Freed from cobwebs, they sail into the present as gossamer, uninvited and unaided: characters' memories, your memories ... the past revisited, dreams and nightmares found. To use a Minnesota metaphor, his ribald class reunion is an arrowhead freed from earth. It is a precisely hewed manifestation, chipped from formless flint, utilitarian in purpose, an artifact representing another time, another culture. Like an arrowhead, it can inflict pain or cause wonderment. "July, July" is 322-pages of bittersweet experience, more pointedly, the part where we leave youth behind and leap into the abyss of middle age.