cover image REMAINS: NON-VIEWABLE

REMAINS: NON-VIEWABLE

John Sacret Young, . . Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, $24 (288pp) ISBN 978-0-374-24903-8

The co-creator of the innovative Vietnam War dramatic TV series China Beach , Young offers a memoir that fugues around the death in Vietnam of his cousin Doug the week before Christmas in 1969. The results are catastrophic for Young's family: his father descends into alcohol-induced brain damage, Young abuses women (his ex-wife, his favorite female cousin and his former girlfriend Dana Delany) and his family suffers all manner of psychic pain after Doug's death. Young's stories, punctuated with extended episodes of reconstructed dialogue, are infused with grief-filled passages on death, loss, disconnection and broken relationships. "All of our lives are fragile nets that tragedy tears at as it sets loose a danger—the impact on the survivors and their relationships." And that is what we get: intimately rendered portraits of life at its most difficult. The odd title was inspired by the way the military classified the bodies of Americans sent home from the Vietnam War as either viewable or nonviewable. Doug Young's body, contrary to the title, was viewable. The aftermath, Young implies, makes for a more difficult spectacle. Agent, Kathy Young. (May)