Review by New York Times Review
DEEP INTO KATHLEEN ALCOTT'S epic, multigenerational novel, "America Was Hard to Find," a young man tells the story of how he landed on the cover of Life magazine. In the picture, he's a 12-year-old boy dropping chrysanthemums down the barreis of rifles carried by National Guard troops at a Vietnam War protest. But the image conceals a more complicated truth: When the picture was taken, this child was high on mushrooms, provided to him by a friend of his mother's. This gulf - between the iconic photograph and the actual human experience, between the public's imagination of history and the way it feels to the person living through it - is the focus of this sprawling but absorbing novel. The story follows the lives of three vastly different people: the boy in the picture, his mother and his father. It opens in 1957 in the Mojave Desert, where we meet Vincent, the man who will become the boy's father. He's a married Air Force pilot who will soon begin training to be an astronaut. Enter Fay, a 21-year-old bartender who has recently rejected the conservatism (and the wealth) of her parents. Fay is smart, independent, adrift. Vincent is stoic to the point of near-total silence. Their affair is brief, and Fay never reveals the resulting pregnancy to Vincent. Yet by the circuitous routes of history, both will also one day appear on covers of Life magazine. Vincent will become the first person to walk on the moon (though a feeling of emptiness instead of glory will trail him afterward). Fay will join a Weather Underground-like group, eventually enacting the kind of horrifying protest that seems designed with the iconic photograph of it blazing in the mind. (Her Life cover.) The emotional heart of the book belongs to their son, Wright, whose childhood Alcott renders with supreme tenderness. A sensitive boy, shaped by an idealistic but somewhat neglectful mother who gradually vanishes into her cause, Wright thinks of himself as perhaps "the loneliest man in America." That feeling lingers as he builds a life in San Francisco as a young gay man, his arrival there coinciding with the start of the AIDS crisis. As Alcott's ambitious (if slightly overstuffed) book ranges over three decades of American history, the era's defining events drift in and out of the lens. The reader can almost imagine leafing through a pile of old Life magazines devoted to the Apollo program, Vietnam, Watergate and the oil crisis. Yet the real energy of the novel is not in Alcott's rendering of these events, but rather in shimmering, knife-sharp descriptions of small and often devastating moments of individual experience within those larger histories. Here, for example, is how Alcott describes Wright's shock when he learns from another child that their parents are planning a series of bombings - and is teased for his disbelief: "Unaccustomed to being mocked, the only response he could fashion was silence. On the cuff of his longsleeve shirt there was a patterning like lace where he chewed it, and he put it in his mouth again, tasting the spit from yesterday trapped there." Some of the book's most memorable sections offer glimpses of the period through the narrow aperture of everyday human longing, like the way Alcott masterfully captures Wright's humble wish for the kind of middle-class American childhood his mother rails against. So besotted with the idea is Wright - out of school and often on the run with his mother - that one day he sneaks into a public school, just to sit in for two happy hours on an ordinary English class. In these moments, the reader experiences the era's social upheavals and contests of values at their most intimate register. KAREN THOMPSON walker's most recent novel, "The Dreamers," came out in January.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Like Franzen or DeLillo, Alcott brings awe-inspiring exactitude and lyricism to her dive into three of America's most iconic moments: the race to space, the rage against the Vietnam War, and the ravages of the AIDS epidemic. Three indelible characters embody truths about this country in transition: Vincent Kahn, a test pilot training at Edwards Air Force Base for the first Astronaut Corps; Fay Fern, daughter of wealth and fortune thumbing her nose at her parents' and country's excessive ways while working at a dive bar her sister owns; and Wright Fern, Fay's son, the permanent result of her transitory affair with Vincent. Vincent's towering fame as the first man on the moon ultimately leads him to a life of seclusion, while Fay's fury at the injustices of war draws her to Shelter, a domestic terrorist group in which her role in a deadly bombing makes her one of America's most wanted. Rejecting his mother's politics and precarious lifestyle, teenage Wright explores his true sexual nature in San Francisco in the early 1980s, to both life-affirming and deadly effect. In her exquisite and poignant reimagining of historic events, Alcott dissects their impacts in a sweeping yet intimate saga that challenges assumptions and assesses the depths of human frustration.--Carol Haggas Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This richly ruminative novel refracts 30 years of American culture and history through the lives of characters who serve as surrogates for their historical counterparts. In 1957, Fay Fern is working as a bartender in her sister's dive bar in the Mojave Desert when she begins an affair with Vincent Kahn, one of the astronauts in training in America's nascent space program. In 12 years, Vincent will become the first man to walk on the moon, and Fay, who leaves him in 1960 while pregnant with a son she never told him about, will have drifted to the radical side of the counterculture as a member of Shelter, an extremist group loosely modeled on the Weather Underground. In the 1980s, Fay and Vincent's son, Wright, who is gay, flees the climate of AIDS activism his partner has embraced to seek out the father he never met. Alcott (Infinite Home) humanizes her characters by focusing intensively on their thoughts and feelings as they grapple with the grand significance of their times and personal experiences, especially Vincent, who thinks of himself as one of the "men with the defining moment of their life now behind them, totally and forever irrelevant." Alcott's novel is a sharp and moving reminder of the human dimension of even the most outsize historical events. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An unlikely affair has lasting consequences for two people seeking certainty in the chaotic America of the Vietnam War era.Repulsed by her parents' privileged lifestyle and moralistic condemnation of her lesbian sister, 19-year-old Fay comes to work in 1957 at Charlie's bar in the Mojave Desert, where Vincent Kahn is one of the pilots testing the new X-15 at Edwards Air Force Base. He's married; their backgrounds, interests, and convictions are decidedly different; yet the relationship endures for two and a half years. Alcott (Infinite Home, 2015, etc.) portrays in evocative snapshots an inner core of solitude and fiercely individual rectitude in each that binds the lovers yet precludes a lasting relationship. Vincent decides to make a break and join the space program, unaware that he is leaving Fay pregnant. Their divergent paths through the 1960s take Fay to Ecuador with son Wright in tow, Vincent to Houston and the Apollo spacecraft. He becomes the first man to step onto the moon shortly before she returns with a Vietnam veteran-turned-militant anti-war activist to the States, there to engage in a series of increasingly lunatic protest gestures. Fay's commitment would be more comprehensible if it weren't depicted primarily through her young son's bewildered eyes; the author seems more intuitively understanding of Vincent's profound lack of conviction, a bone-deep need for solitude assuaged only on the moon and in the high desert. The book's final third, centered on Wright's adult life in 1980s San Francisco, suggests that Alcott aims to synthesize three personal odysseys into a larger statementbut what that might be is obscured by her elliptical narrative development. Nonetheless, her empathy for troubled souls, rendered in haunting, impressionistic prose, makes a powerful emotional impact, giving the novel a staying power beyond that of more neatly finished fiction.Uneven and at times frustratingly enigmatic but impressively ambitious and extremely well-written. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
