Machine Dreams

Jayne Anne Phillips won a Pulitzer this year, and while I might have heard her name, the fact that she got the award intrigued me, and I downloaded this, her first big novel, from the library. It's the saga of a blue collar West Virginia family, and the way the two wars of the generations in the 1940s and 1970s, affected the characters and more broadly, how men's and women's roles were changing. This is a very dry way of describing an incredibly warm and intimate and vital - and deeply sad - story.

Machine Dreams is a wrenching novel that chronicles an American family through decades of reflection and turbulence, culminating in the shattering ramifications of the Vietnam War. For those of us who learned to refract the U.S. through the prism of that savagery, which left millions of Vietnamese dead and vast stretches of their country burned and poisoned, Machine Dreams was a novel that radiated the heartsickness of that era on the home front. American families were, indeed, torn apart by that war, but the weaknesses of those bonds had abiding roots. I was weeping by the time I finished this… show more.