Rating: 
Summary: Redeemed
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Moving, captivating!
Review: I suppose that the characters in "July, July," and perhaps their life-experiences and indulgences, might seem trite to readers who were not members of the Vietnam generation. However, for someone that lived the wasted dreams and years of a nation embroiled in the turmoil of the late sixties, O'Brien captured the essence of what transpired the next thirty years for the members of that 1969 graduating class. My college years, 1966-70 were a myriad of hopes, dreams and promises always shadowed by the horror, waste, and questionable necessity of the Vietnam War. Personal decicions and choices that anyone made during this time, whether in college or being drafted, were always made with the lingering influence of the War. Sometimes, these choices weren't what we wanted, and their outcome would haunt members of our generation for years into their personal lives, careers, and beliefs. O'Brien took me back to a time and place that I had hoped to remember, but not to feel. Unfortunately, his story put me back in college and the demons returned. His book is not just a story or characters, but it truly captures the essence of those bitter, frustrating times. For readers not old to remember, you should be thankful and certainly happy not to have expereinced those emotions. For anyone who lived those bitter years, the faded thoughts, yearnings, and desires will bubble to the surface. They did for me, so read with care.
Rating: 
Summary: Another "dream is dead" take on the Boomers
Review: I thought I'd read some new insights here, but was disappointed. The same old stereotypes about boomers, yuppies, ex-hippies, viet-vets et al. Ultimately I didn't care about what happened to any of O'Brien's characters. They were all unsympathetic. I'm a boomer, and don't know anyone like these [people]. O'brien isn't talkin' about my generation!
Rating:
Summary: Another Amazing Chapter in The O'Brien Odyssey
Review: I'm frankly astonished by the negative reviews for this novel. O'Brien has written several books that can be considered masterpieces--The Things they Carried chief among them. While many loved in the Lake of the Woods, it left me a bit cold (it was still superior). Anyway, I applaud O'Brien for continuning to try something new and different. I am not in my 50s, so I can't judge how real this book is, however, the longing, hope, and passion that these people are looking for or have, is universal. O'Brien continues to move away from fiction that strictly Vietnam and succeeds wonderfully. The book flows and moves along and you are taken along. I cared for these people. In the end, O'Brien is still my favorite writer and one of America's most talented voices.
Rating:
Summary: What a disappointment!
Review: I've heard a lot of great things about Tim O'Brien and read his stories in "The New Yorker," so I was pleased when my book club chose this novel. I have to try another of his books, however, because this can't be a good example of O'Brien's work. I found the premise of this book unrealistic and boring. A group of very different personalities is brought together at a 30th college reunion. They seem interested only in drinking a truly extraordinary amout of alcohol, ... putting long lost romances to bed (literally and figuratively!)and commiserating about their horrible lives. No one seems to have a spouse or kids they care about, fulfilling careers, or any interests whatsoever other than what happened 30 years before. I kept getting the characters confused, no doubt because I found it hard to care about any of them. O'Brien is no doubt a fine writer--I read the chapter "Nogales" in the New Yorker several years ago and remember it vividly to this day. Same for "Too Skinny", the story of an obese man who sheds his weight and finds he can't live with the new person he has become. These chapters stand alone as riveting portraits of people whose lives have gone terribly wrong. But the "reunion" as a device to pull it together is forced, and the weight of so many messed up people in one place at one time is hard to take.
Rating:
Summary: Certainly better than 'Tomcat"
Review: I've read just about all of O'Brien's work since he chronicles our generation and keeps the same themes going. July, July is much better than Tomcat...but it does not come up to In the Lake of the Woods. I had read many of the tales in July in NYer or Esquire and I really believe that these tales worked better as short stories than as tied together class reunion tales. Everyone in July has these 2-5 word pithy comebacks. Voices aren't distinct as they were in Things They Carried and Casciato. It was hard keeping everyone straight for the first half of the book because they all had the same voice when he writes reunion dialog. The novel reads quickly but nothing stays. When I read several of the stories earlier, I thought their impact was far more lasting. There's no doubt he's a clever writer. However, people of our generation with our experiences need far less clever and much more depth in understanding these experiences.
Rating: 
Summary: Reunion of the class of '69
Review: It is July of 2000, and the members of the class of 1969 at Darton Hall College are having their 30-year reunion, one year too late. During the course of the novel, we meet several of those not-so-gracefully-aging flower children, now shopworn and wondering what their lives were really all about. And as the reunion progresses, we journey back into each character's life, to other Julys in other years, when important choices were made that could not be reversed.
While the story and its characters are a bit confusing at first, jumping from viewpoint to viewpoint, so it's difficult to keep straight who is who, who loves who, who is married to who, that is all intentional and the meaning comes clear as each character's story unfolds. Because that's what memory is like, not a smoothly unfolding continuum but a jumble of moments -- the most important moments making up a patchwork of a life. The book feels uneven from time to time, or rushed, or as if some characters get short shrift while others -- particularly David, who represents the Vietnam experience -- appear far too frequently, but none of that really matters.
Because these perfectly ordinary people are, in the end, completely compelling, and so are their perfectly ordinary lives. Breast cancer, Vietnam flashbacks, jiltings, divorces, affairs, the stupid mistakes we all make and we all can relate to are lovingly detailed here. And these characters, despite their many, very human faults, are our friends, our spouses, ourselves -- and all the more endearing for it.
Rating:
Summary: Certainly Not His Best Work
Review: It's interesting that the back cover of July, July, Tim O'Brien's latest novel, compares the author to Don DeLillo. Perceptively, and quite unintentionally, the comparison highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of July, July, exposing a deeply flawed book that still manages to engage the reader. While DeLillo's novels are either tightly constructed studies of one or a few characters or sprawling works like Underworld, with dozens of characters over 800 pages, O'Brien seems to be trying to cram the latter into the pages of the former. Too many characters in too little lead time lead to a book that is disappointing, and yet worth reading. The novel tells the story of a group of former students returning for their 30th anniversary at a small, fictional college in Minnesota. As one might expect, the characters are all wounded in some way-whether by rage, war, disease, or relationships, and these wounds are explored in context of the reunion and through periodic flashbacks. The characters are mostly quite interesting-the problem is that the novel, at a lean 300 pages, doesn't offer enough time to explore any of them in depth. As a result, the novel leaves strong impressions, but nothing more, about most of the characters, and I was left hoping for more information, and more resolution. O'Brien also makes some poor choices about how he allocates his pages. Some characters are not terribly interesting, and we keep returning to them. Each time the novel returned to the two women sitting in their dorm room talking, I wanted to flip ahead, to the more interesting characters in conflict. Some of these vignettes are fascinating, with deep characters that you want to return to. Billy's struggle to overcome his unhappiness after the fleeing the country for Canada during the Vietnam War, for example, is particularly compelling, as is David's battle to regain his wife and deal with his demons from the war. When the story is focused on these characters, the writing is tight and engaging, and you get the strong impression that O'Brien is more interested in their stories as well. Criticisms aside, July, July does offer the usual O'Brien strengths-tight storytelling about characters that are complex and yet credible. July, July might be worth reading for lines like Right now, for instance, she did not say, "Billy, I love you more than anything," because she did not love him more than anything. She loved cashmere." alone. Despite missteps in this work, O'Brien can still often say more in a passage than most authors can in a chapter.
Rating:
Summary: 3.5 stars Worth reading, but not buying.
Review: July, July is a collection of lives, sometimes interconnected, sometimes not, from the "generation that defined itself by its youth." Again O'Brien employs his accessible, simple eloquence, but what's missing is the feeling he usually envokes-that quiet, understated emptiness when real, flawed humans reflect on the accident of their lives. O'Brien picks characters from the college reunion and interweaves their indiviual pasts with the now broken present. The story, however, does not have the cohesion of a collage, where each individual picture can be appreciated, but so can the whole of the work. Instead, this novel is more like a splatter painting- you can focus and sort of appreciate the red splotch and the blue splotch separately, and you can sort of appreciate the whole product --but in the end, it's just a splatter painting, and not able to be rewatched or examined for very long. This book does have interesting characters and situations (particularly Marv, an overweight "best friend" of the beautiful, promiscuous Spook, who keeps giving him hope of a future together, and yanks it away.) But none of the situations seem fully developed, and in the end I didn't have enough invested in any of the characters to want to reread the book. I would recommend O'brien fans read this book, but they may want to get it at the library. It is not as good as his other works. I must say, however, that this book did keep me entertained and did not drag. It's important to note that I am 18 years old, and an older person (50's) may appreciate the book more since it's about their generation, and since they've lived life, seen hope rise, witnessed it fall apart. They may be able to connect with the characters more than I did. In the end, I give this book 3.5 stars. It was an ambitious novel, and O'Brien didn't fail.
Rating:
Summary: 3.5 stars Worth reading, but not buying.
Review: July, July is a collection of lives, sometimes interconnected, sometimes not, from the "generation that defined itself by its youth." Again O'Brien employs his accessible, simple eloquence, but what's missing is the feeling he usually envokes-that quiet, understated emptiness when real, flawed humans reflect on the accident of their lives. O'Brien picks characters from the college reunion and interweaves their indiviual pasts with the now broken present. The story, however, does not have the cohesion of a collage, where each individual picture can be appreciated, but so can the whole of the work. Instead, this novel is more like a splatter painting- you can focus and sort of appreciate the red splotch and the blue splotch separately, and you can sort of appreciate the whole product --but in the end, it's just a splatter painting, and not able to be rewatched or examined for very long. This book does have interesting characters and situations (particularly Marv, an overweight "best friend" of the beautiful, promiscuous Spook, who keeps giving him hope of a future together, and yanks it away.) But none of the situations seem fully developed, and in the end I didn't have enough invested in any of the characters to want to reread the book. I would recommend O'brien fans read this book, but they may want to get it at the library. It is not as good as his other works. I must say, however, that this book did keep me entertained and did not drag. It's important to note that I am 18 years old, and an older person (50's) may appreciate the book more since it's about their generation, and since they've lived life, seen hope rise, witnessed it fall apart. They may be able to connect with the characters more than I did. In the end, I give this book 3.5 stars. It was an ambitious novel, and O'Brien didn't fail.
|
