Customer Reviews

The Post-War Dream: A Novel

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The book ends with "...a sudden understanding that all things born are fated to move toward their end." That describes life and this book.

I have such mixed feelings about The Post-War Dream. I was glad when I finished because much of the story was so painful to read-and at the same time wished it went on forever. Mitch Cullin is a tremendous storyteller and writer who knows how to choose the right word for the right place. For example, he describes sunrises, sunset and weather in such effective detail that the sun didn't just set¬, it did it with such flare of words.

The painful emotions came from reading about a 1950's 18-year-old guy named Hollis who feels unloved at home so runs away and joins the army. Too quickly he is fighting in the Korean War. We live the fighting, loss, inhumanities and friendships right along with Hollis.

We also learn about the then-unnamed post-traumatic stress syndrome and how it affected Hollis all his life as memories and ghosts that haunted him.

The love Hollis and Debra have for each other is so well told you know this couple and really feel their pain. In their long love story, they believe they'll be together forever, having met when Debra was in high school and Hollis was just out of the army because his severe leg wound.

Throughout the book we are moved forward to the present and then backward to Korea and Hollis' younger days. Long-married Hollis and Debra now live in an Arizona retirement community. Life is good-until Debra is diagnosed with ovarian cancer. For two years she receives both traditional and experimental treatments. As Debra's illness progresses, she asks Hollis, "tell me about us"-and Hollis does, telling most but omitting some.

My only complaint is Cullin writes often with long (60-75) word sentences, albeit well-written and filled with a lot of description, however, my brain often got lost in them.

The story is an emotional rollercoaster, so grab your heart and a box of tissues and give it a good read. Cullin's writing will be a gift to you.

Armchair Interviews agrees.

Love, war, cancer and death. The cycle of life continues to turn as Hollis Adams and his wife Debra live out the waning months of the twentieth century in the Nine Springs retirement village just outside of Tucson, Arizona. Told with compassion and incorporating some of the most powerful imagery, Mitch Cullin writes of Hollis's life even as he is forced to confront the messages from his past: the chaos of the Korean War, his mother's strange detachment from life, his bouts of hard drinking, his future father-in-law, his eventual meeting with Debra, and now the greatest test of all - Debra's apparently insurmountable battle with ovarian cancer.

It all starts with a curious snowfall and as the white powder spills down upon an unsuspecting desert, Debra encourages Hollis to write a book chronicling his life, an exercise, which she believes, will preoccupy the downtime of his retirement and help foster some much needed reflection on his past. Hollis, however worries that all of the little details maybe not all that interesting as his life has seemed so fleeting, and generally unspecific as if none of it added up to the number of years he has actually spent alive.

But he does start writing and so begins a life from Tokyo to Tucson and "a bunch of places in between" as Debra tells him that "everyone is interesting and everyone has a story to tell." While Hollis puts his pen to work, unable to relish the lifelessness of Nine Springs, Debra occasionally takes tai chi and ceramics classes at the Funtivities Center, while also occupying herself with escapist fiction.

Meanwhile, when he's not struggling with his book, Hollis cultivates his cactus garden and drinks in his thatched tiki hut by the pool, only occasionally haunted by the flesh and blood of his once torn-apart thigh, reviving the ancient injury caused by a North Korean's man's bullet that had ripped into his leg, the throbbing, indefinite pain had been felt by him since.

Then the phone call comes from Dr. Taylor of the Tucson Medical Center and the accompanying terrible news. Hollis is at first stunned and then immobilized by the Doctor's diagnosis, even as Debra never loses composure. But the news ultimately begins to awaken dormant passions within Hollis, the shock it proving to be too much of an unexpected adjunct to their comfortable lives.

Hollis's new mission is to apply himself to the immediate investigation of his wife's cancer and help her arrange for the appropriate treatments. What starts out as a quiet suburban and comfortable existence soon turns into a race against time as Hollis tries to come to understand the havoc the disease is creating in his wife, how it has managed to spread into her lymph glands, her bladder, the gallbladder. Soon their days are elapsing into quiet uncertainty, both waiting for the next round of treatment or some clear-cut sign that infusions are working and hoping for a positive outcome to the ordeal.

This journey that Hollis takes with Debra becomes an emotional doorway that opens his heart to the world of his past that he has tried to put on the memory back burner until now. Hollis is not the sort of man who is plagued with flashbacks of the things he had experienced during the Korean War even as he remembers how, at just twenty-years-old, he had returned from the battlefront and had an endless quantity of free liquor placed before him. It was here in his younger days, he often had to drink himself to sleep in his hometown of Chritchfield Minnesota.

The hellish destruction of Hollis's time in the Korean war, with the wounded laying dying, and all of the charred remnants of bodies are juxtaposed with another microscopic war quietly raging in the form of the late stage of Debra's disease with its the exhaustion of chemotherapy even as her cancer continues to mutate, increase, "spread like dust motes transported in an afternoon breeze."

Beautifully written with some of the most profound imagery, particularly that of the vast Arizona landscapes, "this region of cacti, diamondback, rattlesnakes, and desert," The Post-War Dream is a poignant account of the life of an ordinary man, unintentionally caught up in the throes of one of life's greatest challenges. A markedly private and quite personal account of a lonely man who must come to terms with the illusion of hope and a less ideal reality, Hollis's journey is characterized by the fact that the pursuit of happiness doesn't come without a price.

Ultimately this kind and thoughtful man is blindsided by the understanding that having lived through war and illness and disease, all things born are fated to move towards their end. Mike Leonard April 08.