Ray Takahashi’s return from the battlefields of World War II should have been triumphant, but the fragrant, budding orchards of his rural Northern California home hide a secret that has destroyed everything he holds dear. With his hair now trimmed short and his newly broadened shoulders filling in his uniform, nineteen-year-old Ray approaches the small house in which he grew up, tucked behind … rows of plum trees he planted with his father, only to find it occupied by a family he has does not know, a white family.Two decades later, John Frazier adjusts to his own homecoming. Detoxing from a dope addiction acquired in the barracks of Vietnam, yet still aching to write the next great American novel, he struggles to silence the phantoms that have trailed him from the muddy jungles. Frazier’s ambitions are put on hold when he finds himself an unwitting witness to a confrontation, decades in the making, between two steely matriarchs: his aunt, Evelyn Wilson, and her former neighbor, Kimiko Takahashi.From the halcyon days of pre-World War II Newcastle, when fruit trees glowed like jewels, through the dusty, cramped nights of Tule Lake, and the wayward years of the post-Vietnam era, Phantoms weaves the splintered stories of two families as they seek an impossible closure. A jarring examination of the personal cost of American exceptionalism and imperialism, and the ghosts that haunt us today, this saga affirms Christian Kiefer’s expanding place in contemporary literature.
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Phantoms sings from its surreal beginning to its stunning end. Kiefer’s prose sweeps the reader back in time to the 1940s, to the internment of Japanese Americans, to WWII and on to northern California in the 1960s, as the narrator unravels the mystery of Raymond Takahashi. Throughout, Kiefer’s writing is lovely, ripe with striking figurative language, as the story unspools in a succession of devastating encounters between two American families: one white, the other Japanese American. In the end, the reader is left with hard truth, bitter as unripe fruit: how we try every day to erase the crimes, large and small, of our pasts, how we pretend to forget them even as they shape our every breath. This is a beautiful, relevant read.
Christian Kiefer is a masterful writer, and this magisterial novel is aching with beauty and power. This is a great book.
Gorgeous writing, foreshadowing that draws the reader to turn pages, wonderful characters, and an exploration of deeply American themes propelled me to read
Phantoms by Christian Kiefer in two sittings.
John Frazier returns from Vietnam a shattered man. He moves in with his grandmother and takes a job pumping gas. He becomes involved with two formidable women whose husbands were once best friends–a confidence man, becoming the bearer of the secrets of their entwined family histories dating to the 1940s.
Aunt Evelyn Wilson’s husband ran an orchard. Kimiko Takahashi was a Japanese picture bride. Their husband worked together, friends over their shared love of the orchard. Their children grew up together.
The ugliness of racism underlies the story of star-crossed lovers separated by WWII and the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the Japanese Removal Act, a story that ends in tragedy.
They would love each other. In secrecy and in silence. And then all of it would blown away, not only because of history but because of their very lives, adrift as they were in the swirling spinning sea between one continent and another.~ from Phantoms by Christian Kiefer
John has struggled for years to contain his experiences through his writing. His early promise as a ‘war writer’ has not been fulfilled. It is time to tell this other story, Ray Takahashi’s story.
If the kind of experiences I had in Vietnam have already become a tired American myth, over told, overanalyzed, then perhaps this is a good enough reason to justify what I am trying to do in these pages, returning to the 1969 of my memory not to write about Vietnam at long last but instead to narrate the story of someone I did not know but whose time in Place County has come to feel inextricably tied to my own. ~from Phantom by Christian Kiefer
I love the language of this book. John notes that he had read Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe twice,”its sentences consuming me. O Lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again,” and was reading it again after the war. I believe I have read it four times! I discovered Wolfe at sixteen in 1969, and fell in love with his language.
This grim story also is a celebration of life. The ending is a beautiful affirmation that brought strong emotions and a catch in my throat.
There are days–many of them–when golden light seems to pour forth from the very soil.~from Phantoms by Christian Kiefer
I purchased an ebook.
Phantoms is a virtuosic unearthing of buried betrayals and traumas–the kind that have the force to shatter myths, both national and personal, and to breach long-held silences. Christian Kiefer has woven a deeply powerful exploration of the way the lies we allow to slip past us can come to poison the foundations of our lives and tear asunder the lives of those around us. This book hums with the pulse of poetry and the pace of a mystery. Let it draw you in and leave you changed.
A rapturous nostalgia haunts the pages of Christian Kiefer’s new novel, Phantoms–nostalgia for lives once lived, for futures lost, for the Edenic before of decisions that cannot be undone. In aching, earthly prose, and with resolute sincerity, Kiefer explores the savage consequences of American fear.
Christian Kiefer’s Phantoms is a kaleidoscopic marvel. With each new chapter, Kiefer deftly turns the dial, shifting patterns and textures and hues, urging us to question assumptions and to reconsider old truths. In confronting the complex legacies of World War II and Vietnam, Kiefer has delivered a haunting story of the past that will make us see the present anew.
The pacing of Phantoms felt like a perfect gallop into every sunset. From the first paragraph, I was captured by the vibrancy of Kiefer’s prose, both as sophisticated and shimmering as the family secrets his characters unwind. Phantoms is a story of history, examination, and is a pleasure to read.