The New YorkerFarrington's urgent, moving narrative turns the war novel on its head. It's 1967, and while Mike O'Reilly, a career marine, is getting shot at in Vietnam, his wife, Lizzie, is dodging domestic shrapnel: she's two months into an unplanned pregnancy, she flinches every time the doorbell rings, and her four children, at school, are hearing that their father is a baby-killer. While Mike's active-duty letters, full of mud and gore, form part of the story, it is Farrington's unsparing account of Lizzie's life at home—the desperately untidy house, her small attempts to carve out time for herself, her mounting anxiety—that takes the novel beyond its particular time and place and makes it a captivating study of tenderness and blame.
