Oh, Johnny

September 29, 2008
PBS NewsHour
anchor Lehrer mixes baseball, WWII and romance in his 19th novel to mostly pleasant results. Even though Johnny Wrigley, from smalltown Lafayette, Md., is being scouted by the Detroit Tigers, he enlists in the Marines in April 1944 to “kill Japs for America.” En route to deployment, Johnny meets Betsy, a striking but naïvely religious doughnut girl, falls instantly in love and seduces her. He vows he'll return for her, a quixotic obsession that sustains him through grittily rendered combat scenes in the Pacific. At the war's end, Johnny returns with marriage on his mind. But Betsy can't be found, and Johnny ends up in Baltimore with a menial bus company job and his big league dreams rekindled. But those, like his romantic fantasy, remain out of reach. Though Johnny's obsessive love for Betsy is a bit hard to swallow, his troubled postwar reintegration is nicely handled and gives readers insight into a Greatest Generation leatherneck.

January 15, 2009
A young ex-Marine pursues two ideals, a major-league baseball career and a young woman he knows only as Betsy, in Lehrer 's bittersweet 19th novel (Mack to the Rescue, 2008, etc.).

It 's 1944, and Johnny Wrigley is 17 and green as grass when the troop transport taking him from Baltimore to California stops off in Wichita, Kan. Though the stop lasts barely half an hour, it 's long enough for Johnny to lose his virginity with Betsy, one of the girls who came to meet the train with apples and smokes for the recruits. Johnny can see that Betsy is religious in an oddly directive way he 's never encountered before. But he also knows from the first that he loves her in a way he 'll never love anyone else, and in a series of letters he composes but never writes down, he pledges his love and vows that he 'll return. That turns out to be a tall order. First Johnny has to survive brutal combat on the island of Peleliu, where he 's been trained to use a flamethrower —an assignment that turns him into a target and gives him a worm 's-eye view of horrific casualties, including those he inflicts himself. Then, on his return stateside, he has to search fruitlessly through Wichita and environs for Betsy before giving up and returning home to Lafayette, Md. Eagerly embraced by his fond mother and the kid sister of a friend who was killed in Europe, Johnny reverts to his original dream: becoming a baseball star in the mold of his idol, Brooklyn Dodgers center fielder Pete Reiser. This dream also goes bad, leaving Johnny with nothing but a menial job and his hopes of returning to both baseball and Betsy. Eventually his dreams come true, but not quite in the way he expected.

The understated tone of this Everyman 's Citizen Kane perfectly suits Lehrer 's gifts, as he eschews his usual satiric stance for a warmhearted evocation of the road not taken.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

January 1, 2009
High-school baseball star Johnny Wrigleys talents earn him a professional baseball contract, but Johnny enlists in the marines to kill Japanese before joining his heroes, center fielders Pete Reiser and Joe DiMaggio, in the major leagues. On a troop train headed for the West Coast, at a 30-minute stop in Wichita, Johnny meets and falls in love with a girl he knows only as Betsy. What he calls Betsy luck helps him survive the bloody invasions of Peleliu and Okinawa, and as soon as hes discharged, Johnny heads for Wichita to find Betsy and marry her. He fails and must try to settle into civilian life and resume his baseball career, but the horrors hes seen make it harder than he expected. Later, he does find Betsy and must confront the realization that time and experiences have changed them both. PBS anchor Lehrer has crafted a profoundly sad and beautiful story of promise and hope crushed by war, of youthful infatuation, and of the wholesale carnage of World War II that wounded much of a generation worldwide.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)