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Summary
Summary
Henry Childs is just seventeen when he falls into a love affair so intense it nearly destroys him. To escape the wrath of the young girl's father, Henry joins the Marines, arriving in Korea on the eve of the brutal battle of the Chosin Reservoir--the defining moment of the Korean War. There he confronts an enemy force far beyond the scope of his imagining, but the challenges he meets upon his return home, scarred and haunted, are greater by far.
From the steamy streets of New Orleans to the bone-chilling Korean landscape, award-winning author Robert Olmstead takes us into one of the most physically challenging battles in history and, with just as much intensity, into an electrifying, all-consuming love affair.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Olmstead's (Far Bright Star) elegiac, gritty coming-of-age novel is presented in three dramatic sections: Part I finds 17-year-old Henry Childs living with his mother, a nurse, in Appalachia, W.Va., during the spring of 1950. His father largely absent, Henry excels at baseball and grooms horses. He falls in love with the fanciful Mercy, the older daughter of a dictatorial judge, and the two elope to New Orleans, where he works as a janitor until Mercy's vindictive brother arrives to take her back. Part II begins with the heartbroken Henry enlisting as a Marine "hunter," armed with the fierce Browning Automatic, and dispatched to Korea, where he participates in the savage and decisive Chosin Reservoir campaign in frozen northeastern Korea. Snippets of male banter help to leaven the hellish brutality endured by Henry and fellow sniper pal Lew, a veteran of WWII. One year later, Part III opens with the shell-shocked Henry, only a bit older but significantly transformed, returning home to W. Va. up the Kanawha River, where the pain of his mounting personal losses threatens to overwhelm his sanity. Despite the narrative's darkening vision ("The Lord is a man of war," says Henry), enough redemption rescues Olmstead's powerful, desolate, and well-crafted novel from becoming oppressively bleak. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
West Virginia high-school students Henry and Mercy fall madly in love, but Mercy's wealthy, willful father warns Henry to keep away. The teens flee their homes and go to New Orleans. But Mercy's father and older brother track them down, nearly kill Henry, and take Mercy away. When he recovers, Henry joins the marines and finds himself in Korea when a massive Red Chinese army attacks in human wave assaults at the Chosin Reservoir, the brutal, days-long battle that was fought in temperatures that reached 30 degrees below zero. Henry barely survives, and when he returns to West Virginia, he is emotionally aged, despite still being too young to buy a drink legally. Olmstead employs different authorial voices to shape the story. At times the tone is mythic, at times surreal. This is understandable, because Henry, despite being introspective, is simply too callow to cope with overwhelming first love, lost love, and the battlefield savagery he took part in and endured. The Coldest Night is powerful, and often beautiful, storytelling.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"HE wore new shoes and they were stiff and still wore a store shine." He is Henry Childs, grandson and nephew to characters in other novels by Robert Olmstead, and he is on his way to his sweetheart's high school graduation. She is the daughter of a town judge, far above Henry's working-class station but a girl who seems to return his love. Notice in that sentence the no-rush gait, the unadorned yet unambiguous description, the resonant alliteration. Here is a boy unused to dressing up, uncomfortable with formality. It's a tiny detail, perhaps a disposable one, yet this is the kind of sentence that warms "The Coldest Night" and makes you wonder if Olmstead was meant to be a poet. But Olmstead is a novelist, and a very good one. The title of his new work refers to many things, both literal and metaphorical, but most explicitly to a handful of horrific evenings in 1950, during the Korean War, when the United States fought the Chinese in temperatures plunging to 30 below. Henry, only 17, has lied about his age. The relationship with the high school girl has ended violently - a rich judge doesn't need a poor fool for a son-in-law - and so Henry has fled to the Marines. He has a hazy sense of joining something eternal and beyond his command. He's heard the stories of his grandfather, who fought in the Civil War, and his uncle, who led a group of soldiers searching for Pancho Villa in Mexico (see Olmstead's novels "Coal Black Horse" and "Far Bright Star"). Henry broods: "How shallow his history and yet how complex the threads of memory." He isn't anxious about dying - maybe even longs for it - but plagued by insecurities and sensitivities, he dreads coming up short, failing to weave an enduring thread into his family's collective memory. "I'm not nobody," he's forced to remind himself, thus revealing his mind's default setting. Though Olmstead's evocations of battlefield horrors can be stirring, it's his depiction of war's less monstrous aspects - the continuous repositioning of troops and reshuffling of strongholds, the ceaseless anticipation of surprise attacks, the unmitigated exhaustion - that steadily unsettles. "He could not bear how long this forever moment as he waited and waited for what he knew was coming," Olmstead writes. "He wanted to rest and wondered if they wanted to rest too." These lines lend a humanity to war that descriptions of guts and gore alone cannot. The small faults in "The Coldest Night" exist in spaces that shadow the book's much larger successes. In rare instances, an Olmstead sentence tumbles into self-parodic affectation: "The pools of blood were shockingly crimson on the white snow in the yellow light of the bluing sky." And though it happens infrequently, he's also capable of delivering bald, untrusting explanations of his protagonist's trajectory. "There was something new and very dangerous inside him," the narrator tells us. "There was nothing that mattered to him. There was nothing he needed. He would live on what remained." This undermines Olmstead's sketch of Henry, who otherwise can't comprehend his ambiguous and transmuting desires. In the course of one terrible year, his body, mind and heart are shattered by the savageries of love and war. Which, "The Coldest Night" asks, is worse? Mike Peed is on the editorial staff of the Sunday Review section of The Times.
Kirkus Review
Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
A combination of war novel and love story, this work follows Henry, a young man in 1950 West Virginia, as he falls for a wealthy young woman and runs away with her to New Orleans. When their affair is violently interrupted by her family, Henry enlists in the marines. The Korean War is raging, and Henry experiences an epic battle, gruesome wounds, and unforgettable horrors. Although the book is framed by a love affair, the heart of it-and where the narrative is most gripping-is Henry's experience in combat. Olmstead (Coal Black Horse) has a spare, direct style that is most effective in the brilliant, engrossing combat descriptions and ironic marine banter. In the West Virginia scenes, the clipped conversations of the characters are more noticeably stylized. VERDICT A novel of the early 1950s and the Korean War that will appeal to readers of literary fiction.-John R. Cecil, Austin, TX (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
