| Title | : | America Was Hard To Find |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Kindle Edition |
| Number of Pages | : | 432 |
| Publication | : | First published May 14, 2019 |
Years earlier, Fay and Vincent meet at a pilots’ bar in the Mojave Desert. Both seemed poised for reinvention—the married test pilot, Vincent, as an astronaut; the spurned child of privilege, Fay, as an activist. Their casual affair ends quickly, but its consequences linger.
Though their lives split, their senses of purpose deepen in tandem, each becoming heroes to different sides of the political spectrum of the 1960s and 70s: Vincent an icon with no plan beyond the mission for which he has single-mindedly trained, Fay a leader of a violent leftist group whose anti-Vietnam actions make her one of the FBI’s most wanted. With her last public appearance, a demonstration that frames the Apollo program as a vehicle for distracting the American public from its country’s atrocities, Fay leaves Wright to contend with her legacy, his own growing apathy, and the misdeeds of both his mother and his country.
An immense, vivid reimagining of the Cold War era, America Was Hard to Find traces the fallout of the cultural revolution that divided the country and explores the meaning of individual lives in times of upheaval. It also confirms Kathleen Alcott’s reputation as a fearless and vital voice in fiction.
America Was Hard To Find Reviews
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This book! Oh my goodness. I will never understand why it did not get the publicity and marketing support it deserved. I will go back and read this author’s first and second books – her writing is that spectacular!
About the book… How timely was this novel? It was published on May 14, and the anniversary of the Apollo 11 Mission was July 20, 1969 – 50 years ago. One of the main characters is a fictitious NASA astronaut who took the first step on the moon. So, there’s that bit of timeliness.
But also, this book does an incredible job of capturing a nation’s unrest during a period of political uncertainty (during the Vietnam War, which coincided with the Space Race). There are plenty of interesting parallels that can be drawn between today’s America, with its air of uncertainty, its young people who feel lost and adrift and rebellious. And, yes, the novel has a young, defiant character whose life is connected to the astronaut’s. The third main character is her son, caught in the fray of his mother’s actions.
Even if you don’t consider yourself highly politically charged, this is worth a read. Because, at its heart, it is a book about people and relationships and the decisions we make as humans.
With a dense, rich style of literary writing that delivers the reader right into the hearts and minds of the characters, you will feel a part of their worlds. This is character-driven literary fiction at its best.
I like books that make me think. And this incredibly intelligent book did just that. This is a novel about outsiders finding their place in the world, in their country. And in large part, I felt the story begged a larger question: where do we draw the line between personality quirks and mental health disorders?
I read this on my iPad and have made several of the passages viewable, but also wanted to include a few samples of the delicious language in this book; metaphors and rich sensory descriptions abound:
This was the real misfortune of the people on earth, he thought: they had made their lives somewhere they had never really seen.
Gasping and coughing is a barbed pleasure, the idea his body might get rid of anything. Wouldn’t it be good to eliminate an organ, any of them, survive on less, be made of less.
Her way with people, drawing them out, was like those magician’s scarves, silky and effortless and a little bit evil.
As he turned to go she caught him leaving, and she threw him a look as though he were a chore too long postponed, some filth that had spread and changed.
His temperature had ranged about wildly, near shiver to near fever. In his rearview Wright ran a comb through his hair, an act so unfamiliar to him that he thought he looked like a cartoon doing it, a dog trying to pass as human. He walked the parking lot of the strip mall with the sort of panic that is quick and bright, all silvery angles of movement.
If you enjoy literary historical fiction, open-ended finishes, deeply drawn and flawed characters, this book will send you over the moon . -
I heartily and sincerely recommend this novel for those who loved
Fates and Furies, or who love the novels of
Michael Ondaatje.
While these authors don't superficially resemble one another much, to me they all seem to share a Proustian-like interest in paying rapt attention to every quotidian thing that happens along the way to telling their story. To me they're "crème brûlée, crème brûlée! Let's have the same dessert every day!" kinds of writers. Each and every sentence is so rich and creamy that after a while I personally start longing for a sentence that's more like a stale heel of bread. The style here held me at arms' length from the story and its characters, but it's exactly what will draw other readers in. -
This was a very different novel. I really don’t know how to even begin to review it, except to say that the writing was beautiful and I came away from reading this with an extreme sense of sadness about our country. Maybe it’s just the state of America right now and my personal view of it.
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I love a good sprawling novel, one that swings for the fences -- perhaps even more so when it doesn't quite get there. There's something to be said for ambition, especially when so much of the book is so wonderful, and Alcott really makes it into orbit several times with this one. The first section is superb, all dry-heat and summer sun, the thrill of scientific progress mixed with the thrill of sex. And just about any time Vincent ends up back on the page, later in the novel, I was transfixed. Fay and Wright, however, are more fitful characters and their fitfulness feels intentional, but just doesn't always feel as vivid. Put another way, nothing about the middle of the book is bad; it just doesn't do what the first third did for me.
The ending, however -- the last dozen or so pages -- are a tremendously daring feat and one that had me gripping the cover of the book and drilling my eyes into the words again and again to catch a glimpse of... well, of what happened.
This is a great summer read, warts and all. -
Lots of storylines, lots of locations, lots of perspectives. Lots of incomplete stories that collectively did not add up to something worth finishing. I rarely quit a book, especially book with alternate history, but this one I gave up on 2/3rds of the way through. There are so many good books out there to read, and at this time in my life, I want to read what is good, not what leaves many readers scratching their heads for a long time after.
She is a beautiful writer with a sure grasp of phrasing. But, I felt as if the stories themselves were told in flashes, rather than with sufficient development. Why does Fay hate her parents? Why does she move to the jungle? Why does she care for any of the men she is with? The book is full of vivid images, suddenly highlighted as if someone turned on a bright light of illumination. A few pages later, just when things are getting interesting, things move on. -
Alcott writes a pretty sentence but her storytelling leaves so much unsaid that the main character remains an enigma.
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Reading this book was like crawling over broken glass. It was one of the worst books I have ever read. It seemed the author's intent was to make everything as obscure as possible. I had to guess at everything the author was alluding to. My biggest mistake was continuing to read, hoping it might get better. It never did, and in fact it became more obscure the more I read. What a waste of my time and energy.
She, the author that is, is the queen of pronouns. She starts off chapters and paragraphs and sentences with "he" did that, "she" did that, without identifying who "he" or "she" is, creating unnecessary mystery for no good reason. Every sentence in fact is a mystery; it's as if the author is going out of her way to be as vague as possible. Why not tell a straightforward story instead of hints at a story?
I won't get into the totally unsympathetic characters.
The only positive thing about the novel was its thoughtful rendering of decades of struggle of America coming to terms with its demons.
I really hate this kind of contrived and pretentious writing. What an exasperating read. I do not recommend it to anyone. -
Ugh. Could not finish this. I hated everyone except the horse.
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What drives people to achieve greatness or infamy? In America Was Hard to Find, Kathleen Alcott tells the story of a brief love affair and the child who resulted. It beings in the late Fifties where Vincent Kahn, a married jet pilot marking time while hoping to join the space program has an affair with a young woman named Fay Wren. Fay does not tell him she is pregnant, aware of the harm they have done Vincent’s wife and, perhaps, realizing how unworthy he is. Strangely both of them will become famous, one for walking on the moon and the other for political terrorism.
The story is told in three parts. First the love story, then the story of Vincent and Fay achieving the fame and infamy that seem fated. Fay raises their child Wright in precarity, with the future uncertain, often on the run and underground. Vincent achieves his goal, but seems to be emptied out, an empty man.
Wright grows up longing for normalcy. One of his big rebellions against his mom is going to a public school for a day. He gets that normalcy when he goes to live with his grandparents, but it’s not all he hoped for. No one has ever told him who his father is, but time and again, people tell him he looks like the famous astronaut, the first man who walked on the moon. He suspects they may be on to something He seems alienated from himself, even as he begins his own self-discovery in the San Francisco of the Eighties.
I liked America Was Hard to Find a lot even though it left me with so many questions. I cared about Fay and Wright and even Vincent. I wondered how differently their lives would have progressed if they had been honest about their emotions. That is what I want from a book, the questions and sometimes the anger about how a character behaves. I was angry with Vincent, Fay, and even Wright.
Alcott does a great job of setting the stage in terms of the history and the social milieu. She based Shelter on Weather Underground and did a lot of research and interviews with astronauts to get an authentic sense of who Vincent would be. The main characters seem emotionally broken and I wonder if that is the point, that they cannot be so obsessed with their causes if they were not broken.
America Was Hard to Find will be released on May 14th. I received an e-galley from the publisher through Edelweiss.
America Was Hard to Find at Ecco Books | Harper Collins
Kathleen Alcott author site
★★★★
https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpre... -
Rare to see a book reach so audaciously for the epic while maintaining its toeholds in the crevices of details with nary a misstep. One of the year's best for me without a doubt.
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I was so excited about this book when I picked it up and started reading about Fay, and to a lesser degree, Vincent. Very quickly this novel became tedious and never ending feeling. Great topic and premise, but poorly executed. Prose for the sake of prose without sparking one iota of interest from this reader.
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I really tried to get into this story, but after the first half I decided to not spend another minute with it. It was OK, but not something I really liked. The time period and setting , 1960’s during astronaut training in the Mojave desert, were interesting, but I felt the characters just weren’t likable, and it was hard to understand their motivation. I just didn’t relate to them.
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Contrived, tries too hard - ugh. Another dime store novel - ugh-ugh.
Add poem (here):
A profound sense of isolation,
stems from the knowledge we are alone inside our heads,
archangels drift overdose.
#poem
Chris Roberts, God All Over You -
Not for me. Characters coming and going without introduction or importance, lack of real storyline, I skimmed and skipped around. Not a complete read but enough.
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I wish I could give this more stars. It is incredible. Every sentence.
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i ended up LOVING parts of this -- the writing was so lush that I just felt drawn in and didn't want to stop. it's an ambitious novel and i think parts of it don't quite work because the text is so withholding about its characters. in particular i think the pieces about write and fay's time in the us part of the revolutionary group feel a little flat, whereas vincent, despite being a more distant character, feels more realized. it took me over a month to read the first fifty pages and once i moved past that, i was fully immersed and finished the rest in a weekend (also it was overdue and the library is harassing me).
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Very nice treatment of three eventful American decades. Think of some American writers of the 1960s to ‘80s—Didion, Mailer, Wolfe, DeLillo—and more recent ones—Rachel Kushner, Nathan Hill, Rebecca Makkai, and most lately Salvatore Scibona—and their topics—1960s California, the space program, Vietnam, the counterculture, the violent radical left, AIDS—and here’s a work to join them. Imagine a plot involving a fictional first astronaut to walk on the moon, a fictional rebellious heiress, and their misbegotten son and his decades-long story that shows America to indeed be hard to find, capturing the feel of those years and specific events in a paced but lively narrative that moves and some wonderful writing along the way—often stunning in its descriptions, attention to detail, metaphors, and insights into the characters set against the background dramas of the times.
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The last third of the book lost me a bit, but overall this was ambitious and interesting.
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This is a story of intersecting lives—drawn from real life events (Apollo 11moon landing, civil unrest and anti Vietnam War demonstrations, the violent Weather Underground actions, the “Aids Crisis” in a San Francisco and across the nation in the 1980s and the government’s refusal to do anything about it and even the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster). Alcott creates a tale in which the first man on the moon has an affair with a Patty Hearst-like character (running away from her affluent parents and eventually joining a resistance group) and fathers a son who struggles to find his identity and who comes to resent his mother for the radical life she immersed him in as he was growing up. Alcott’s writing is dense and complex. I found myself skipping passages or rereading them! Her fictitious astronaut names were distracting in their similarity to the real original astronauts’ names (Bisson for Grissom). The BEST passage in this book is a searing rebuke given by the astronaut’s wife to his young mistress. She tells her that men who have affairs with younger women change the landscape for all married men who hold out hope for their window of opportunity and their wives are left struggling with self doubt, hating birthdays and mirrors. Only Alcott says it much better than my summary. I’d give her an extra half star for those 3-4 pages!
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Disliked this book thoroughly. The themes running through this book sounded amazing and exactly like something I would enjoy but the writing style just dragged and made it a tedious read.
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My review of this book appears in the 6/23/19 print edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. At the moment, it does not appear to be on their website, so let me just quote myself, briefly:
"One thoughtful novel can't unpack all of America's generational damage, but Alcott's story is a good step in the right direction. If America is hard to find, maybe it's because we're not really looking" (pg E-6). -
The subject matter seemed perfect: Vincent, a married test pilot, meets Fay at a bar in the Mojave Desert in the 1960s. Fay gets pregnant, has a baby boy who she names Wright. Vincent becomes a national hero, walks on the moon. Fay becomes part of a violent, leftist, anti-Vietnam War (+ anti-space exploration) group, based on the Weathermen. Fay disappears; Wright drifts untethered through life. Wright eventually surmises who his father is and writes heartfelt letters to Vincent who was unaware he had a son. Watergate happens. The space shuttle Challenger explodes; President Reagan speaks to a country mourning the deaths of civilian astronauts. AIDS happens.
Basically, this book has everything that would interest someone who experienced all referenced events of the 1960s-1980s. Yet it didn’t work for me. The writing was of good quality, but the storytelling too oblique for my taste. A straight-on story of these decades would have been fascinating, but Alcott’s more “sideways” approach left me feeling disconnected from characters that should have been compelling. -
I received a free Uncorrected Proof copy of this book from the Goodreads Giveaways program and am thankful to anyone who made that possible.
This novel follows the lives of two very different people who briefly intersect and the child that springs from this intersection and explores how people are shaped by their pasts and where/what they came from. The writing style took me some time to warm up to but once I fell into it, I was all in.
My only complaint was the ambiguity in This may have been fitting but I was disappointed because I was highly invested in him as a character.
I found this to be extremely moving, engrossing and informative and I would highly recommend it to anyone with any interest in the 1960's, political activism/radicalism, the space program, or the AIDS crisis of the 1980's. -
"For my money one of the most brilliant and under-appreciated novels of 2019, I’m genuinely baffled as to why Kathleen Alcott’s epic, haunting reimagining of the Cold War era hasn’t appeared on more Best of the Year lists or award shortlists. America Was Hard to Find is the story of Fay Fern, an uneasy child of privilege turned radical, and of Vincent Kahn, a fighter pilot who becomes the first man to walk on the moon, but it’s also the story of Wright, the lost boy born of their short-lived affair and the slow-breaking heart of this lyrical, devastating book. Thrillingly ambitious in its scope, achingly intimate in its psychological portraiture, it’s a Pulitzer-worthy work of American fiction.
–Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor"
Literary Hub, December 5, 2019 -
Not my kind of writing, nor my kind of story. Only got about 5% done when I decided not to waste any more time on it. Went back and read more. The part I read, up to about 20% was from the viewpoint of a very troubled woman and the protesters of the Vietnam war. The viewpoint is not mine and the writing was not what I enjoy
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This novel was gut wrenching, heart breaking whilst maintaining a powerful account of American history, Alcott is ambitious and intentional around her characters. I felt bound to the experience of Fay and her son, the development of these characters was unpredictable and turbulent. Could not recommend this enough!
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Title: America Was Hard to Find
Author: Kathleen Alcott
Age Group: Adult
Genre: Historical Fiction
Series: Standalone
Star Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars
I received a copy of this book in a First Reads contest giveaway—my thanks to Goodreads and Ecco Publishers!
I won this book as a prize in a First Reads giveaway, and I’ve been winning so many books recently that I’m trying to coordinate them by the month so as to line them up close to their actual publication dates. America Was Hard to Find was the first book in that stack that I could find that was published in May, so I decided to read it before I went back to my library stack. I just finished this book this morning, and I don’t know how I feel about it, honestly. Sad, thought-provoking, strange and visceral, this reimagining of The Cold War era was a strange story that I will never forget. It revolves around Fay Fern, a bartender turned radical, Vincent Kahn, an astronaut that is about to take America’s first steps on the moon, and the son that results from their forbidden union, Wright. Spanning decades and generations, this book was odd, brutal, strangely tender and thought-provoking. It’s hard to get my feelings on paper, because they’re all tangled up. This book was heartbreaking, tender, sad and blatantly political.
Fay Fern is the daughter of affluent, wealthy parents, and both she and her sister, Charlie, have spurned their family’s wealth and constrained way of living. The girls’ only friend is a mean, drunk horse named Lloyd. Faye spends her days bartending and reading books. But the monotony of her life is broken by the arrival of a married astronaut, Vincent Kahn. They two begin a secret, forbidden affair, and nine months later, Fay’s son, Wright, is born. This book documents how Fay and Vincent attract one another, and Wright’s coming of age in the wake of his mother becoming a radical domestic terrorist. As I said, I’m not really sure how this book made me feel. It was vivid and well-written, but there were a lot of words that I wasn’t familiar with, and the pacing was kind of all over the place. But the characters were well-drawn and sympathetic: I liked how Fay and Charlie turned their backs on their controlling, constraining family boundaries, and I also enjoyed Wright as he grew up with his strange, radicalized mother. I liked the ending, and the other characters, but I really didn’t like Vincent. He just seemed thin and emotionless, and the book was bittersweet. Searing, eye-opening, and more than a little strange, America Was Hard to Find was a good book, even though it wasn’t normally one I would pick up. The bottom line: Political, bittersweet, tender and strange, I really enjoyed America Was Hard to Find. Next on deck: Grim Lovelies by Megan Shepherd!
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