Saturday Review: “A Port of Despair” a review by Jon Kesler of Michael Keenan Gutierrez’s The Swill (2022) in NCLR Online Fall 2023.
We are so excited to start sharing book reviews forthcoming in our fall issue (due out in October)!
Following its protagonist Joshua Rivers as he tries to “protect his sister, shelter his wife, and cover his own ass,” Gutierrez’s The Swill “captures the gritty feel of a place and point in time.” That place is the fictional city Port Kydd – more specifically, the Bonny, “a downtrodden neighborhood” – and that time is the 1920s, where bar keep Joshua runs “The Swill, a below ground speak easy in the heart of the Bonny that has been the life bread of the Rivers family for decades.”
But taking care of his family and running his bar only become more difficult, Joshua has returned from World War I “dragging his memories of the war along into his future,” in what reviewer Jon Kesler diagnoses as “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder – or shell shock in the vernacular of the day.” Add to that a night of unrest in the neighborhood fifty years ago, a painting painted by Joshua and Olive’s grandmother, insurance fraud, and an “historical cover-up scheme,” competing families, and you start to get an idea of everything Joshua is up against.
Gutierrez returns to writing about characters coming back from war, which reviewer Kesler ponders about in an aside, “The PTSD is so well woven into Joshua’s character that it made this reader wonder whether the author has lived or witnessed at close hand the experience of combat’s lingering aftereffects.” Since contemporary vets are still dealing with the current versions of shell shock, having literature to assist with understanding is critically important.
Read the review before it is published this fall and buy the book on Bookshop.org or from your local independent bookstore.
