Soldier in Paradise

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

With a refreshing lack of bombast or melodrama, first novelist Mort offers an insightful, affecting look at the complex personal consequences of war--specifically Vietnam--on the lives of its veterans. James Patrick "Irish" Donnelly, a reluctantly enlisted infantryman, narrates his story in direct, candid chapters alternating between his experiences in Vietnam and his life in the U.S. before and afterward. Stateside chapters chronicle Donnelly's troubled relationship with his father, the breakup of his marriage, his migration from Missouri to Florida and his falling in with a group of variously dysfunctional fellow veterans who raise money by selling their artwork. Overseas chapters capture not only combat memories but the daily grind and the psychic wear and tear of the job. Mort's portraits of Irish's fellow soldiers are lovingly drawn. There's Lieutenant Sherry, a Harvard man; Ransom, a serious black sergeant who once saved Irish's life; C.C. Ryder, "who got high every morning and did his best to stay that way." Most potently, there's Norman Sims, an unsophisticated private from Oklahoma who becomes Irish's special project as Sims stumbles haplessly from medal-winning heroism to emotional frailty, till finally he's beyond help. The vets whom Irish bonds with in the U.S. are a motley group, each man scarred in his own way. Most striking is Otto Sanchez, a double amputee. Irish soon realizes what his presence means to the group: "It's a nasty thing to say, but I think having Sanchez among us was comforting, because he made it clear how much worse things could be." Mort's unsentimental narrative draws the reader deep into Irish's story with a consistent air of authenticity and frankness, eschewing the emotional manipulativeness and ax-grinding of flashier Hollywood versions. (Nov.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

In this fictional memoir, James Patrick Donnelly, a.k.a. "Irish," recalls his tour of duty in Vietnam and his subsequent difficulties back home. In 1969, battle-seasoned Irish is assigned to watch over Norman Sims, the proverbial new guy, who promptly shoots himself in the foot. Sims later redeems himself with reckless acts of bravery, falls in love with a Vietnamese boom boom girl, and eventually ends up in military prison like a modern-day Billy Budd. Donnelly's narrative moves from Vietnam to the United States in alternating chapters, contrasting his honorable military career with a succession of postwar humiliations. Sadly, many of the defining details of the war--the drugs, the rock'n'roll music--have become tired clich s, and it is increasingly difficult to portray the experience in fresh and meaningful ways. Books such as Thom Jones's The Pugilist at Rest (LJ 4/15/93) and Stewart O'Nan's The Names of the Dead (LJ 3/1/96) prove that it isn't impossible. This book is a solid and affecting addition to the Vietnam canon, but it never manages to transcend the constraints of the genre. Recommended for comprehensive collections of Vietnam literature.--Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch., Los Angeles Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A never exaggerated and always engaging first novel that explores the whole of a Vietnam GI's life, by Kirkus contributor and former Booklist editor Mort (the collections Tanks, 1987;The Walnut King, 1990, not reviewed). Nicknamed "Irish" by his fellow soldiers, James Patrick Donnelly comes from southern Missouri, where his boyhood life was poor, mean, and unenlightened, his father (who never once writes his son a card or letter the entire time he's in Vietnam) a bully who, after his wife dies of cancer and he loses his farm, takes up with another woman on the patently false pretense that he's going to marry her. Even so, this is the father who in one way or another continues to guide the son, even after the war, when, finding himself in psycho-emotional free-fall ("There were so many jobs I can't remember them all. Seventeen, was it, in twelve years?"), Irish heads for Florida ("When I was a boy, my father, tough old George Donnelly, would talk of Florida as though it were Paradise"). Irish's hapless involvements with women there, with other veterans, with one job after another, are offered up against the backdrop of those scenes in Vietnam itself that form the novel's backbone, unifying past and present. In Vietnam, Irish meets Norman Sims, the awkward and off-putting Oklahoma rube, patriot, fundamentalist—and instinctively courageous hero—who will eventually become Irish's alter ego and tragically lost brother. Before that stage of recognition can be reached, however, the reader will be taken through swamp, plain, paddy, and jungle with Irish's beleaguered platoon, through stages of death, suffering, horror, misery, irony, pathos, and humor that will finally allow thestory to cohere, giving epiphany (especially through Sims's astonishing end) and the promise of wholeness to its thinking narrator's previously shaken and uncentered life. Intelligent, sensitive, and unflaggingly honest: a novel deserving of its place among the chronicles not only of that war but of its era.