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Summary
Summary
"In Ithaca, New York, in 1982, Larry Markham awakes to discover his wife, Vicki, has taken their young son, Scott, and left him - not for the first time, possibly for the last. It is a deep blow to a life already in fragments: a dead-end job delivering Wonder Bread; a strained relationship with his aging father, a veteran of World War Two; and weekly visits to the VA hospital where Larry, a former Army medic, leads a support group for disabled Vietnam vets. As he struggles to win Vicki back, Larry finds he is in danger of a far more imminent sort: A disturbed member of the support group - a trained CIA assassin - has disappeared, and is stalking Larry and his family. His methods send an unmistakable message: The game will end in death." "At the same time, The Names of the Dead is a harrowing and heartfelt portrait of the Vietnam War and the men who fought it. The year is 1968, the place A Shau valley, and Larry Markham - nineteen and green - must find a way to keep his platoon alive. Here we see the stories Larry cannot bring himself to tell - of friends who made the ultimate sacrifice in a war their country scorned." "The Names of the Dead is the story of a man trying to find his way back to himself - a story about storytelling and memories that refuse to fade. It is the story of a man rediscovering the courage to love one woman, and, through her, the world, his country, his family, and finally himself."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author Notes
Stewart O'Nan was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on February 4, 1961. He received a B. S. from Boston University in 1983 and received a M. F. A. in fiction from Cornell University in 1992. Before becoming a writer, he worked as a test engineer for Grumman Aerospace from 1984 to 1988.
He has written several novels including The Speed Queen, A Prayer for the Dying, Last Night at the Lobster, The Circus Fire, and Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season. In the Walled City won the 1993 Due Heinz Literature Prize; Snow Angels won the 1993 Pirates Alley William Faulkner Prize; and The Names of the Dead won the 1996 Oklahoma Book Award. Snow Angels was made into a feature film in 2007. In 1996, he was listed as one of Granta's best young American novelists.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Heart-rattling melodrama set against a thriller background hallmarks O'Nan's second noveljust as it did his first, Snow Angels, which won the 1993 Pirates Alley William Faulkner Prize for the Novel. By 1982, Larry Markham, an army medic in Vietnam, has been reduced to delivering Hostess snack cakes around Ithaca, N.Y. One morning, he awakens from familiar dreams of combat to find that his wife, Vicki, has left him again. Fed up with his attachment to the war and with his reluctance to share his wartime memories, she has fled with their learning-disabled young son, Scott. As Larry struggles to reunite his household, the failing health of his father becomes a problem, as do his growing feelings for Donna, the lonely neighbor who looks out for him in Vicki's absence. Worse, Larry also is being stalked by a dangerous hospital escapee, a trained assassin and fellow Vietnam vet with a mysterious score to settle. This suspense element, though ably presented, is the least satisfying facet of the novel: it's neither as poignant as Larry's complicated family drama nor as original (Peter Straub's Koko limned a similar scenario). Unusually powerful, however, are the extensive renderings of Larry's Vietnam memories, which come alive with gruesome violence, complex camaraderie, tension, humor, hope, superstition and terror. While not as seamless as O'Nan's first novel, this follow-up offers a confident, gripping narrative, as well as some of the most searing wartime storytelling in recent memory. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
The author of the prizewinning Snow Angels (1994) offers a clever reformulation of a frequently exhausted theme--a shell- shocked Vietnam vet finds that his real troubles begin long after he returns safely home. Larry Markham is one of those characters who could be said to have found their rut. A Cornell grad who went to Vietnam over his father's objections, he's settled back into daily life in Ithaca, where (more than ten years after his return from combat) he drives a delivery truck and volunteers as a therapist at the local VA hospital. Markham was a medic in Vietnam, and his obsession with the war and the lives he saw destroyed by it now stands as a barrier between him and anyone who didn't share his experience: His wife Vicki complains that ``It's like a religion with you. . . . You keep torturing yourself with it. That's what your group at the hospital's all about--keeping it fresh.'' Even when Vicki leaves Markham for another man, he doesn't seem able to make the connection between his inability to get over the war and his failure as a husband. Instead, he begins an affair with his wife's best friend--herself abandoned by her husband--whose mental instability has kept her as emotionally isolated as Markham himself. But before any resolution to his domestic turmoil appears, Markham finds himself threatened on another side--by a patient who becomes convinced that Markham's father was responsible for his mother's death and sets out to kill him and Markham both. The intricacy of the plot--most of the characters have some secret and usually malign link with others that only gradually becomes apparent--could easily have become far-fetched or predictable, but O'Nan orchestrates the proceedings well by providing a parallel narrative of Markham's experience in Vietnam and by refusing to settle all the questions in the end. A credible and moving account of moral failure and regeneration: thrilling, mature, and thoughtful.
Booklist Review
In his second novel, the author of Snow Angels (1994) takes a now overworked subject--a Vietnam veteran's troubles--and comes up with a real winner of a book. It's 1982, and 16 years after coming back injured to upstate New York from his tour of duty as a medic in Vietnam, Larry Markham still cannot escape his memories of being in country. Larry is especially haunted by the belief that he somehow failed to keep the 13 men in his platoon alive. That sense of failure is exacerbated by his disintegrating marriage, guilt over his mentally disadvantaged son, a difficult relationship with his father, and a dead-end job delivering snack cakes. He's tired of being regarded as a stereotype, the Vietnam failure; his volunteer time spent counseling a group of disabled Vietnam veterans gives him some sense of peace, but when one member of the group, a trained CIA assassin, escapes from the hospital and appears to be stalking Larry and his family, Larry realizes he has to forgive himself for not dying in the war. O'Nan's language is powerfully restrained; his word pictures of the war and its effect on the men who fought there are fresh and vivid. He rightfully refuses to pander to our desire for easy answers and happy endings. The last scene, at the newly opened Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D. C., is presented as just the first step in what might, or might not, be Larry's eventual healing. --Nancy Pearl
Library Journal Review
Having triumphed with his first novel, Snow Angels (LJ 10/15/94), winner of the 1993 Pirates Alley William Faulkner Prize, O'Nan ventures forth with a tale both subtle and sensational: a down-and-out young man whose wife has disappeared with their child discovers that they are being stalked by a former member of his Vietnam veterans group. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.