In her short novel, Bringing Vincent Home, Madeline Mysko has presented a portrait of a family brought together by adversity, despite mixed and far-ranging views on the difficult subjects of religion and war.
Though this is a work of fiction, the story is narrated as if it is a memoir by Kitty Duvall, through whose eyes we see a stateside military burn ward in all of its drama. At the start of the story, Kitty is a very strict Catholic with strong pro-war feelings. She is not one to question what she is told, either by church or state. In fact, Kitty doesn’t even seem to give any thought to why she believes what she believes. However, her three children – Jack, Mary Kate, and Vincent – all have radically differing viewpoints on the Vietnam war, convenient for a story that attempts to explore without negating the various stances on this controversial topic. And through Kitty’s deepening relationships with each of her maturing children we see her own maturing thought processes as she begins to really question things she’s always taken as “a given.”
Kitty’s youngest son, Vincent, is drafted into the war and suffers burns to 36 percent of his body when the plane he’s in is shot down. Kitty rushes to Brooke Army Medical Center (BAMC) at Fort Sam Houston to be with her son. Although the time period during which the novel takes place spans only three weeks, in the burn ward time and emotions are compressed so that every moment is dense with importance – the difference between saving a finger or losing it, every goodbye potentially final, every scream from “the tank room” carrying with it the hope of saving a young man’s healthy skin tissue. Kitty becomes very close very quickly to the staff and other visitors of BAMC, surprising herself with the ease at which her relationships develop and deepen.
Mysko herself served as a lieutenant in the Army Nurse Corps at Broke Army Medical Center during the Vietnam War. The details provided in the novel are not gratuitous, but extraordinarily factual and straightforward. What I appreciated most was that Mysko does not romanticize the situations, doesn’t overly dramatize or emphasize, doesn’t pontificate: she leaves the reader to the mental task of deciding what he or she thinks about a given situation.
Despite the innumerable war stories that have come before this, Mysko has managed to bring a fresh approach in her novel, adding a complex voice without jumping on any bandwagons. Through her characters’ struggles with their views, Mysko helps us see that comfort can be found in the gray areas between what many folks throughout history have wished to paint in only black and white terms.
178pp.
This is Mysko’s first novel.
