2024 Book Review Series: The Intrigue of Pathetics

While this novel took me a bit longer to get through, my reading pace is no reflection of my enjoyment. It was quite the opposite; other parts of my life kept me busy but I frequently found myself wishing I could steal a minute to read. Now that I've reached the back cover, I wish there was more left to go.

Alex Gilvarry's novel Eastman Was Here takes place in the 1970s at the tail end of the Vietnam War. The three separate parts of the travel from New York to Saigon and back to New York as the namesake character, Alan Eastman, accepts a deal to report on the war for The Herald. At the same time, Eastman is dealing with a separation from his wife of ten years, Penny, who has recently announced she is leaving him because he no longer loves her, though she has really been dating a new man. Eastman believes the trip to Vietnam will not only revive his plateaued writing career but also make Penny take him back.

As I've mentioned in a couple of book reviews before this one, I am a lover of character-driven fiction. For a reason even I'm unaware of, the characters that intrigue me the most are those best described as pathetic. Gilvarry's protagonist, Alan Eastman, may as well be pictured in the dictionary as the definition for this word. He can't help but say the wrong thing, he lost any sense of a backbone years before this story takes place, and he's frequently made to beg for forgiveness in sticky situations of his creation. His character sent me through a cycle of resenting his selfish idiocy and hoping the love he so desperately craves would return to him soon. When you read this story and see every evil Eastman commits, you'll understand that keeping his character sympathetic was no small feat. I believe the key to making his readers stick with Eastman is his central character trait of being pathetic.

I had few issues with this novel but, ironically, I did find the lack of action distracting. Although I enjoyed Eastman Was Here as a piece of character-driven fiction, I found the section set in Vietnam quiet compared to what the characters had previously made out to be a dangerous war. While I was not expecting Eastman to be on the front lines, the scenes Gilvarry included in this portion of the novel did not show much of the reporting he was there to do, nor did it provide the finished dispatches he wrote for The Herald. The real story may have been about Eastman's marriage but more elements of the subplot would have complemented the primary storyline.

All in all, Gilvarry's novel added to the list of enjoyable books I've read this year. Not only that, but I would rank it highly on that list as well. It's vulgar, it's messy, and it's challenging, but it's all of those things in all the right ways. I'll be recommending it to others, though I'll have to be careful about who.