What do you think?
Rate this book
Coming Home
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 20, 2022
My former professor, George Davis, wrote this book as a young man, and it's quite illuminating to read. This is a story told from multiple people, both men at war, and their women at home, and how disconnected they are with both the fighting and each other. Or at least, that's the interpretation that I got out of it. In truth, it's a book that has a lot to say, and maybe almost too much to say, as I feel like I missed something in the process of reading it. Even so, it's a relatively short book, so I feel like it has hidden wonders that I might not have picked up on. It very much feels like a book of the times, and I'm going to watch the movie soon, which, as George Davis mentions in the foreword, whitewashed the characters, and removed all of the racial tension in the book. What else is new?
February 20, 2013
I read this book when it was published in 1972 and I read it once every couple of years. Coming Home follows in a tradition that is seldom seen in American novels. I can think of few American novels which do a better job than this one at showing that imaginative literature can be a vehicle for truths that cannot be explained but only felt in the universe that the novel creates.
It dramatizes the problems of the human conscience during the Vietnam War, a war which vast numbers of American saw as an attempt at neo-colonial suppression of a people (The Vietnamese people) who wanted nothing more than to be free.
The novel was written at the end of a decade when much of the world was breaking free, and this includes African Americans who populate the universe that the novel creates. In almost equal number white Americans populate that universe also; and the dangers of combat ties both groups together in camaraderie and antagonism so complex that neither can express the simplest human feelings without reference to the other.
This is the point made in a review of the book that Jerry Bryant wrote in The Nation magazine at the time of the book’s publication: “attempting to formulate from his own experience the meaning of the war for both blacks and whites Davis struck a strange new dimension, one we would expect to find explicit in the sentences of Kurt Vonnegut or the scenes of Stanley Kubrick, but not even implicit in the neo-realism of Coming Home.
This inadvertent penetration makes his novel a conundrum, and the results is an effect stranger than that of Vonnegut of Kubrick because it is so unexpected. The reader’s impression of the lives entangled in this war is one of vast confusion: moral, social, political and military.
I am now reading Davis’ newest novel, The Melting Points, and I find that the penetration is not inadvertent, as Bryant states. It is a penetration into spiritual dimensions where nothing can be as explicit as they are in the clockwork universe.
Of Coming Home Bryant wrote: this is one of the few novels I have read recently in which I have faintly perceived a subliminal stirring. I wonder what George Davis will produce next, for he seems to be attuned to those vibrations that announce to the privileged what is to come.”
I can’t wait to finish The Melting Points. The spiritual dimensions have got me going.
It dramatizes the problems of the human conscience during the Vietnam War, a war which vast numbers of American saw as an attempt at neo-colonial suppression of a people (The Vietnamese people) who wanted nothing more than to be free.
The novel was written at the end of a decade when much of the world was breaking free, and this includes African Americans who populate the universe that the novel creates. In almost equal number white Americans populate that universe also; and the dangers of combat ties both groups together in camaraderie and antagonism so complex that neither can express the simplest human feelings without reference to the other.
This is the point made in a review of the book that Jerry Bryant wrote in The Nation magazine at the time of the book’s publication: “attempting to formulate from his own experience the meaning of the war for both blacks and whites Davis struck a strange new dimension, one we would expect to find explicit in the sentences of Kurt Vonnegut or the scenes of Stanley Kubrick, but not even implicit in the neo-realism of Coming Home.
This inadvertent penetration makes his novel a conundrum, and the results is an effect stranger than that of Vonnegut of Kubrick because it is so unexpected. The reader’s impression of the lives entangled in this war is one of vast confusion: moral, social, political and military.
I am now reading Davis’ newest novel, The Melting Points, and I find that the penetration is not inadvertent, as Bryant states. It is a penetration into spiritual dimensions where nothing can be as explicit as they are in the clockwork universe.
Of Coming Home Bryant wrote: this is one of the few novels I have read recently in which I have faintly perceived a subliminal stirring. I wonder what George Davis will produce next, for he seems to be attuned to those vibrations that announce to the privileged what is to come.”
I can’t wait to finish The Melting Points. The spiritual dimensions have got me going.
February 15, 2013
Not much to recommend, I'm afraid. The book contains two reviews that came out when the book was originally published in '72. I agree with the one I agree with one by Jerry Bryant in The Nation. He said: this “is not an ambitious novel. It certainly is not a great one. It is self-consciously literary. It is clearly the work of a young man. And often the technique of the interior monologue results in characters who are cardboard stereotypes.”
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews