The Given World

In this Bukowskian debut, Riley is 11 years old when her older brother, Mick, is declared missing in action in Vietnam. Riley finds her whole world turned upside down by the news. As the 1960s turn into the ’70s, Riley grows up and takes a number of itinerant jobs—garage mechanic, bartender, babysitter—as she flees her family farm in Montana and makes a new life in the Bay Area. Along the way, she becomes pregnant, hangs out with junkies and AIDS victims, and seems content to drift through life. Through it all, the hole left by her brother’s absence looms large in her life. Finally, in the early ’90s, she goes to Vietnam and visits the tunnels at Cu Chi to make peace with his disappearance. But news of an illness back home sends Riley to Montana for a reckoning with her parents and the newborn she abandoned two decades earlier, now a young man. Like the heroine of this novel, the narrative has a tendency to ramble. The novel’s true strengths are the variety of characters Riley meets on her journey and the sense of America changing with the decades. In the end, what the reader takes away is a visceral appreciation for how many lives, both on and off the battlefield, were permanently altered by the Vietnam War. (Apr.)