Reviewing a book this long after it was published (in 2007) is unusual. But Bringing Vincent Home (Plain View Press, 2007; 182 pp., $14.95, paper) is an unusually compelling novel, and letting readers know about it ten years late still seems a lot better than not letting them know at all.
Author Madeleine Mysko has written a Vietnam War story that is remarkably true to life— but just as remarkably different from the conventional fiction of that war. Mysko served as an Army nurse whose wartime service was not in Vietnam but at the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas—specifically in the center’s burn ward, then and now the Army’s main facility for treating soldiers with severe burn injuries. The burn unit is the setting for her novel, which is narrated by the middle-aged mother of one of the casualties being treated there.
Both the setting and the narrative voice are not the familiar ones in Vietnam War novels. The story takes place in a Texas hospital, not on the battlefields of Vietnam. It’s not told from the viewpoint of the generation that fought the war (or avoided it or protested it— that is, the author’s generation), but by a member of the previous generation, a woman who reached adulthood in the very different wartime America of World War II. For both those reasons Bringing Vincent Home reflects a different angle of vision, putting a new and illuminating light on the Vietnam War for today’s readers.
In the novel’s opening sentences, the narrator, Kitty Duvall, answers the phone in her modest home in Baltimore one day in August 1969 and is told by an Army casualty officer her that her son Vincent, the youngest of her three children, was wounded in Vietnam and will be evacuated to Japan and then to Texas. Three short paragraphs later, Kitty is walking off a plane in San Antonio, hoping to stay as close to her son as she can during his treatment.
In the 170-plus pages that follow, through Kitty’s eyes we witness Vincent’s physical and emotional ups and downs and are introduced to nurses, doctors, and chaplains who care for him through those swings. We meet her older son and her daughter, who has become an antiwar activist and whose certainties about the war clash with Kitty’s deep confusion about it.
We see relatives and girlfriends visiting other patients and glimpse their anguished efforts to deal with their men’s pain and disfigurement. We share Kitty’s memories and feelings, too, including the comfort she gets from her deep Catholic faith and her conflicted feeling about the same faith because it will not let her end her marriage to the abusive, alcoholic husband who abandoned the family many years before.
All of this comes across with perfect-pitch authenticity. Details of time, place, perspective, and emotion are all completely plausible. Kitty Duvall is as real as any fictional character I remember.
Madeleine Mysko
If I hadn’t known that the author was not a burn patient’s mother or anywhere close to Kitty’s age, I would have been certain I was reading real-life memories, not fiction—a narrative that is all the more powerful when we remember that nearly half a century after this story takes place, wounded American troops are still arriving in the burn unit from distant and controversial wars.
Madeleine Mysko has crafted a novel that is as believable as it is moving. I hope it will continue bringing Vincent home to readers for a long time to come.
The author’s website is mmauthor.com/bringing-vincent-home
—Arnold R. Isaacs
Arnold R. Isaacs, a former Vietnam War correspondent, is the author of Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia; Vietnam Shadows: The War, Its Ghosts, and
Its Legacy; and, most recently, From Troubled Lands: Listening to Pakistani Americans and Afghan Americans in Post-9/11 America.
Books in Review II 