I have to give credit to Kristin Hannah for one thing: most authors wouldn’t have had the guts to use this many Vietnam War-era cliches in one story.
Frances “Frankie” McGrath is a privileged California girl who desperately misses her brother, a Naval Academy grad serving in Vietnam. Misunderstanding her father’s constant bragging about their family’s tradition of service, she signs up to be a nurse, enlisting with the Army because the other branches require years of experience while the Army is desperate for anyone they can get. Instead of being proud, McGrath’s parents are bewildered and scandalized by her decision, concerned about what their friends at the country club will say.
Frankie’s reception “in country” is hardly warmer. Thrown right into the fire, McGrath spends her service dealing with the constant horrors of war, treating many dismembered soldiers and watching many others die. The only saving grace of her time in ‘Nam is the strong bonds formed with her two best friends, fellow nurses who understand the struggle. Aside from the war itself, Frankie also struggles with her romantic life, falling for a kindly doctor and a dashing helicopter pilot before being separated from both by the vicissitudes of combat.
Hannah also tracks Frankie back to California after her service is up. She deals with the public’s anger at the direction of the war and the disdain shown towards those who served. while also dealing with those who dismiss or misconstrue her service at all, insisting that there no women in Vietnam or that, since Frankie didn’t technically “see combat” she couldn’t possibly be struggling with her return to home.
The problem with The Novel is that it is unrelenting misery porn with soap opera-level plotting and flat, uninteresting characters. Hannah seems to enjoy just heaping pain and grief onto her main character, all the better to wallow in her inevitable turn to alcohol and pills and eventual breakdown. Obviously, lots of bad things happened to Vietnam veterans, but Hannah has basically decided to capture that by having evert single one of them happen to a single Army nurse. It’s absolutely comical.
