The Given World

February 2, 2015
In this Bukowskian debut, Riley is 11 years old when her older brother, Mick, is declared missing in action in Vietnam. Riley finds her whole world turned upside down by the news. As the 1960s turn into the ’70s, Riley grows up and takes a number of itinerant jobs—garage mechanic, bartender, babysitter—as she flees her family farm in Montana and makes a new life in the Bay Area. Along the way, she becomes pregnant, hangs out with junkies and AIDS victims, and seems content to drift through life. Through it all, the hole left by her brother’s absence looms large in her life. Finally, in the early ’90s, she goes to Vietnam and visits the tunnels at Cu Chi to make peace with his disappearance. But news of an illness back home sends Riley to Montana for a reckoning with her parents and the newborn she abandoned two decades earlier, now a young man. Like the heroine of this novel, the narrative has a tendency to ramble. The novel’s true strengths are the variety of characters Riley meets on her journey and the sense of America changing with the decades. In the end, what the reader takes away is a visceral appreciation for how many lives, both on and off the battlefield, were permanently altered by the Vietnam War.

February 15, 2015

Riley's older brother Mick is everything to her. His knowledge of the world, his music, his motorcycle--all light up her provincial existence on their Montana farm during the Sixties. It's traumatic enough for Riley when Mick leaves, first for college, then to fight in the Vietnam War, but when he is reported missing in action, life becomes a crushing burden for Riley. What follows are years of wandering from one place to another and a revolving door of relationships, jobs, and coping mechanisms. Whether she is in San Francisco or Vietnam, delivering newspapers or tending bar, getting high or getting drunk, Riley can never escape the hole left in her heart by Mick's disappearance. VERDICT Riley tentatively connects with many characters and then loses them, and it is sometimes hard to keep track of all these downtrodden souls. There is a meaninglessness to Riley's experiences that don't seem to amount to anything in the end except a general exhaustion. However, debut novelist Palaia's prose is hypnotizing, and her fresh descriptions make the sadness portrayed bearable. This is a somber literary read but not without a dark beauty. [See Prepub Alert, 10/27/14.]--Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA

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