Loving Women

February 27, 1989
Although it covers well-worn ground--a 17-year-old sailor's passage to manhood in the 1950s--veteran journalist Hamill's latest novel is told with such emotional urgency and pictorial vividness that it has the flavor of a well-liked old story rediscovered (in fact, it shares a good deal of atmosphere and incident with Neil Simon's Biloxi Blues ). Brooklyn-born Irish Catholic Michael Devlin (who narrates from middle age, heading toward his third divorce) arrives at his Navy base in Pensacola, Fla., with ambitions to become a cartoonist, lose his virginity and solve some of the mysteries of adult life. Lessons are imparted by a brutish master-at-arms, an ineffably hip black musician, and a cynical, smart fellow sailor who is a closet homosexual. Most important in his life is Eden Santana, a kind, emotionally bruised older woman with whom Michael falls hopelessly in love. Although Hamill's characters all have a ring of familiarity, and he insists too firmly on giving every one of them a sad secret and a predictable confessional monologue, he invests real passion, narrative energy and fondly remembered detail in this novel, and it pays off. BOMC alternate.

April 1, 1989
For Michael Devlin, a middle-aged photographer working on his third divorce, life has never been as good as it was in 1953, the year he joined the Navy, left Brooklyn for the first time, and met the only woman who ever understood him, the mysterious Eden Santana. Now, driving his sports car by the naval base in Pensacola, Florida, Devlin tries to recapture a time when his world view derived entirely from Steve Canyon and Buz Sawyer comic strips. Reexamining simplistic Cold War thinking as a Steve Canyon nightmare is a great fictional premise, and had Hamill pursued it, much of the two-dimensional characterization in this novel might have been justified. As it stands, however, the book is just another maudlin Fifties memoir in which self-realization is synonymous with great sex. Only fans of that overworked genre will enjoy it.-- Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles

Copyright 1989 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.