Gorgeous writing, foreshadowing that draws the reader to turn pages, wonderful characters, and an exploration of deeply American themes propelled me to read Phantoms by Christian Kiefer in two sittings.

John Frazier returns from Vietnam a shattered man. He moves in with his grandmother and takes a job pumping gas. He becomes involved with two formidable women whose husbands were once best friends--a confidence man, becoming the bearer of the secrets of their entwined family histories dating to the 1940s.

Aunt Evelyn Wilson's husband ran an orchard. Kimiko Takahashi was a Japanese picture bride. Their husband worked together, friends over their shared love of the orchard. Their children grew up together.

The ugliness of racism underlies the story of star-crossed lovers separated by WWII and the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the Japanese Removal Act, a story that ends in tragedy.

They would love each other. In secrecy and in silence. And then all of it would blown away, not only because of history but because of their very lives, adrift as they were in the swirling spinning sea between one continent and another.~ from Phantoms by Christian Kiefer
John has struggled for years to contain his experiences through his writing. His early promise as a 'war writer' has not been fulfilled. It is time to tell this other story, Ray Takahashi's story.

If the kind of experiences I had in Vietnam have already become a tired American myth, over told, overanalyzed, then perhaps this is a good enough reason to justify what I am trying to do in these pages, returning to the 1969 of my memory not to write about Vietnam at long last but instead to narrate the story of someone I did not know but whose time in Place County has come to feel inextricably tied to my own. ~from Phantom by Christian Kiefer

I love the language of this book. John notes that he had read Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe twice,"its sentences consuming me. O Lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again," and was reading it again after the war. I believe I have read it four times! I discovered Wolfe at sixteen in 1969, and fell in love with his language.

This grim story also is a celebration of life. The ending is a beautiful affirmation that brought strong emotions and a catch in my throat.

There are days--many of them--when golden light seems to pour forth from the very soil.~from Phantoms by Christian Kiefer

I purchased an ebook. ( )

An unforgettable story about fate, betrayal, and culpability.

John Frazier, a young recently-returned Vietnam vet, is struggling with addiction and guilt for his part in the war. He stumbles across the story of another vet, Ray Takahashi, a Japanese-American sergeant who was allowed to fight on the European front during WWII and who then disappeared after returning to his hometown (John's hometown, also). (The area in question, Placer County, California, was in real life glad to see their Japanese fellows bused away to concentration camps and then actively discouraged from returning.) John is approached by a distant relative of his, a woman at the center of Ray's fate, and becomes involved in piecing together what happened that fateful day when Ray walked back into the life of the town from which his family had been forcibly displaced and imprisoned for the war's duration.

A mystery, a study of friendships and racial tension, and a story of a soldier looking for a way to return to a civilian life. Beautifully written and very highly recommended. ( )

I saw this novel on a number of coming-soon lists and put myself on the hold list at the library and I was #1, so I got it the week it came out. It’s set in Placer County, CA, an area with which I have some familiarity. It involves two storylines, one set during World War II and focusing on the war, Japanese Americans and internment, and the effects of both on two families, and the other set in the 1960s-80s and focusing on the long-term consequences of decisions made during the earlier period. The narrator is a Vietnam vet who has come back with drug addictions and PTSD and is living with his grandmother, away from his parents in Southern California. He becomes drawn into the families’ stories through his connection to one of them: the white family’s mother is his grandmother’s cousin.

The first chapter felt clichéd but then the second chapter made me think that that was intentional because the register changed and became much more effective. The perspective of the narrator worked well for me because while the majority of the storyline(s) revolved around nonwhite and female characters (and the narrator is a white man), it was his perspective on what was happening rather than an attempt to directly represent theirs. But then, toward the end of the novel, I realized that the book was as much about him as about the women or the Japanese American men, which kind of pissed me off. I wanted him to remain an observer, but in the end he was the one who came out doing the best from everything that happened. I can’t be more specific without massive spoilers, which I won’t give away since the book just came out. But I found it really frustrating and it made me angry that in the end, the white male narrator (whom I mostly liked), wound up pretty much embracing his privilege despite his awareness of how it benefited him and how others didn’t have it.

It retrospectively made his telling of the story of internment and its consequences, which so was not his story, feel far more problematic than it did at first. I can’t explain why very well but it made me almost angry to have read the book. I think it’s the combination of self-awareness and introspection about what he gained (and at whose cost) with the fact that his life, despite the legacies of Vietnam, turned out pretty damn well, especially compared to everyone else’s. And he didn’t do a thing to ameliorate anyone else’s losses. Add to that the repeated textual invocations of Great White Male Writers just in case we didn’t get the allusions to Wolfe, Faulkner, Styron, et al. (the author even namechecks The Confessions of Nat Turner). Acknowledging your privilege (I’m talking about the narrator here) is neither a necessary nor a sufficient substitute for actually doing something with it and about it. I don’t really care how being blessed makes you feel. I care about what you do with those blessings, especially when they are born from the theft of what belonged to others.

But then again, maybe that’s the point. Maybe the fact that, in the waning years of the 20thC, the narrator is able to be the beneficiary of an inheritance that he acquired through the injustice, unfairness, and violence visited upon the nonwhite Americans who were his neighbors and friends, maybe that is the message that is meant to be conveyed. That’s certainly the reality of the situation that ends the novel, and the narrator is well aware of it. So maybe I’m looking for certainty when ambiguity is the goal. I just don’t know. ( )