Indeed, there’s something special about Frankie. Within months, she becomes an experienced trauma nurse, confronts the horrors of gut wounds and napalm with courage and compassion, rages against the naïve indifference of her family and friends back home — and attracts the devotion of handsome, tormented, unexpectedly married men.
Hannah is in top form here, plunging the reader into the chaotic miseries of the combat zone. She deploys details to visceral effect, whether Frankie’s performing an emergency tracheotomy during a mortar attack or sipping Fresca in the O Club afterward, while an evocative soundtrack of the Doors, the Beatles and the Turtles plays in the background. (“Music followed the smoke, infusing it with memories of home. ‘I wanna hold your ha-aa-aa-nd.’”)
With Hannah confidently in control, we swoop above the jungle canopy in a Huey chopper, peppered by sniper fire, and skid across the Mekong Delta on a pair of water skis. The historical scenery is rendered with such earnest authenticity that the few millennialisms — “girl squad,” for instance, snapped me back to the present day, as did a pair of kids named Kaylee and Braden — jar precisely because the author otherwise recreates this world so convincingly.
But Hannah’s real superpower is her ability to hook you along from catastrophe to catastrophe, sometimes peering between your fingers, because you simply cannot give up on her characters. If the story loses a little momentum after Frankie completes her second tour — slingshot to the finish by a series of occasionally strained plot twists — well, isn’t that the way it went for so many veterans returning home? Without the imperatives of war, you stumble along until you find your way.
In the end, I was struck not by the way “The Women” radically reshapes the contours of our Vietnam narrative, but instead by how vividly the novel affirms them. Hannah may not offer any revolutionary takes on the war and its aftermath, but she gathers women into the experience with moving conviction. And maybe this story’s time has come again. Over dinner one night, I described “The Women” to my college-age daughter — a young woman with her finger on the cultural pulse — and she perked right up.
