Rating: 
Summary: A Moving, Funny Page-Turner
Review: July, July is enjoyable, satisfying reading and my favorite work by Tim O'Brien. Full of compelling characters, his portrayals are honest and authentic.
The book is effective on many levels. He shows the impact of missed opportunities and wrong choices as well as loss, disease and heartbreak and he does so with honesty and humor. He also writes about passion, love and the healing power of friendship.
This novel reinforces Tim O'Brien's stature as one of the best writers of our time. I highly recommend it.
Rating: 
Summary: Another solid, good book from O'Brien
Review: July, July is the kind of book you feel an author like Tim O'Briend can write effortlessly. The kind of book that floats from his pen like Picasso drawing on a cocktail napkin. Beyond the first glimpse of the belated 30th reunion, however, the book is anything but lazy or sloppy. The characters are bold people. Bold as in people who standout in their ordinary lives. They live with enough emotion that these lives feel new again, but its a retelling of familiar stories. Liars, imperfect ministers, amputees, cancer survivors: all living with the ghosts of regret that come with life and hope for the future (or at least something better). Mr. O'Brien floats between the "present" and 30 years ago when these people were in college (i.e. young, stupid, reckless). Often he shows the consequences before the causes. This device has the effect of making you sympathize with their mistakes, making you feel like the mistakes are yours. This is a book of great writing, great characters, emotion, etc. While not as good as say Lake of the Woods, Things they Carried, it is a step up from The Nuclear Age. Also, its a departure from Tomcat. The reader sympathizes with these characters more, making it an easier book to read for some. I liked Tomcat and feel that this book and it are about equal in terms of craft, character, story, etc. Just very, very different worlds.
Rating:
Summary: Age of Irony
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Good Read, current themes
Review: O'Brien does a nice job weaving the lives of the characters away and back again. Points out that everyones' life has a story to it which causes us to reflect on our own lives. Current themes we can all relate to.
Rating: 
Summary: Surprisingly weak effort
Review: O'Brien wrote two books that I consider superior works of modern fiction: "In the Lake of the Woods" and "The Things They Carried" (which I rank with "Paco's Story" as one of the two best pieces of literature to emerge from the Vietnam War). Unfortunately, he fails to approach that level of writing with "July July," a largely hackeneyed effort to resurrect the old high school reunion plot device. The occasion for the work is a gathering of late '60s high school graduates, all of whom, of course, have failed to live up to the idealistic dreams of youth, etc., etc. We've been in this territory before, but the reader hopes that O'Brien's considerable writing skills will lift him above the book's mundance premise. Alas, it is not to be, and there are at least three reason for the failure. First, as in a book I recently reviewed, Richard Price's "Samaritan," too much of the novel relies on characters telling other characters what happened to them years before, rather than relating the actions as they occurred. Second, there is often insufficient motivation for characters to even relate these stories -- which, by the way, are often fantastic and strain credulity. For example, one character who has become a church minister relates to a former classmate she hasn't seen for 30+ years a strange story of a clandestine relationship with a man many years her senior and her attempt to break into his house to steal letters documenting the "affair" -- an effort which ended in her dismissal from the parish. We're left to wonder not only why she would reveal all of this, but what in the world would have driven this character to act in the way she did. Since we know very little about her as a younger woman, it's impossible to say. O'Brien succeeds only when he returns to the ground on which he is most confident: the soil of wartime Vietnam. In the book's most affecting section, he details the life-changing injury one of his characters suffers in a suprise attack during the war. The descriptions of the vet's difficulties in his marriage after returning from Vietnam also ring true and are sensitively rendered. When O'Brien strays from this turf, however, he struggles, and the novel limps to an unsatisfying end. The reader is left wondering what he knows about the characters he has met during this weekend of carousing and reminiscing, and the conclusion is not much -- and he doesn't believe, in most cases, that any of it could have possibly happened anyway in the way O'Brien describes anyway. For readers new to O'Brien, skip this one and move directly to the two aforementioned works or "Going After Cacciato."
Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly weak effort
Review: O'Brien wrote two books that I consider superior works of modern fiction: "In the Lake of the Woods" and "The Things They Carried" (which I rank with "Paco's Story" as one of the two best pieces of literature to emerge from the Vietnam War). Unfortunately, he fails to approach that level of writing with "July July," a largely hackeneyed effort to resurrect the old high school reunion plot device. The occasion for the work is a gathering of late '60s high school graduates, all of whom, of course, have failed to live up to the idealistic dreams of youth, etc., etc. We've been in this territory before, but the reader hopes that O'Brien's considerable writing skills will lift him above the book's mundance premise. Alas, it is not to be, and there are at least three reason for the failure. First, as in a book I recently reviewed, Richard Price's "Samaritan," too much of the novel relies on characters telling other characters what happened to them years before, rather than relating the actions as they occurred. Second, there is often insufficient motivation for characters to even relate these stories -- which, by the way, are often fantastic and strain credulity. For example, one character who has become a church minister relates to a former classmate she hasn't seen for 30+ years a strange story of a clandestine relationship with a man many years her senior and her attempt to break into his house to steal letters documenting the "affair" -- an effort which ended in her dismissal from the parish. We're left to wonder not only why she would reveal all of this, but what in the world would have driven this character to act in the way she did. Since we know very little about her as a younger woman, it's impossible to say. O'Brien succeeds only when he returns to the ground on which he is most confident: the soil of wartime Vietnam. In the book's most affecting section, he details the life-changing injury one of his characters suffers in a suprise attack during the war. The descriptions of the vet's difficulties in his marriage after returning from Vietnam also ring true and are sensitively rendered. When O'Brien strays from this turf, however, he struggles, and the novel limps to an unsatisfying end. The reader is left wondering what he knows about the characters he has met during this weekend of carousing and reminiscing, and the conclusion is not much -- and he doesn't believe, in most cases, that any of it could have possibly happened anyway in the way O'Brien describes anyway. For readers new to O'Brien, skip this one and move directly to the two aforementioned works or "Going After Cacciato."
Rating: 
Summary: Big Disappointment
Review: Sorry, Tim, this is not one of your best efforts, and a major disappointment after Tomcat in Love. I was one of the few people that laughed out loud with Tomcat, a comedic triumph! I've also loved all your previous books which in one way or another deal with the Vietnam War and its impact on the American psyche. This one did not make me laugh or cry - it was just dull!! Too many characters and I didn't really care about any of them.
Rating:
Summary: The Big Chill meets The Anniversary Party
Review: The reunion of Minnesota's Darton Hall Class of 1969 isn't exactly picture perfect... With a host of colorful, yet heavily flawed characters, this book scrutinizes true love, friendship, tragedy and regret at all levels imaginable. A fun ride.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting, but ultimately flawed
Review: This is definitely not up to the standards of O'Brien's best work. I'm surprised nobody else has mentioned what to me were the obvious flaws: the forced, fake dialogue, and the disappointing use of cliches. Nobody noticed that every single character omitted pronouns and prepositions while speaking? i.e., "Not born yesterday" instead of "I wasn't born yesterday," or "Should have been fun. Wasn't." Most people don't talk like that, and expecting us to believe every single character in this novel does is a stretch. There is hardly a single passage of dialogue that isn't written in this manner, making me think it must be some kind of nod on O'Brien's part to postmodernist irony or something. If so, it's beneath him. He shouldn't pander his writing to the flavor-of-the-month fans of Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer. As to the cliches: over and over they appear, crashingly simple ones you wouldn't want to see in the fiction of a novice, such as "ritzy country club" (which he uses at least three times) and "fancy suit." Ritzy, fancy? O'Brien can, and in the past, always did, do better. The characters are well-developed, and some of their stories are much more interesting that the shenanigans at the reunion (especially Marv's fantasy/lie about being a famous reclusive author, which was well-done - other than the fact it was too obviously supposed to be Thomas Pynchon). But they aren't terribly likeable characters, are they? Whine, whine, whine. I wish I had more positive things to say, as O'Brien is one of my favorite living authors. I thank God I didn't splash out the (Money)cover price, and was fortunate instead to receive the book as a gift. It's worth a read, but instantly forgettable. I can only hope this doesn't signal a trend in O'Brien's career.
Rating:
Summary: It takes you to the resting place of self and soul.
Review: 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.
|
