The bestselling Vietnam novel is terrible.
If there’s one novel that dominated 2024, it was The Women, by Kristin Hannah. The only thing more amazing than its reported 1-million-copy first printing is that it seems likely the book warranted it: The Women debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times fiction bestseller list in February, and is still hanging out at No. 4. It won the Goodreads Choice Award for Historical Fiction, and over 850,000 Goodreads users have given it an eye-popping average rating of 4.62. (As point of comparison, Pride and Prejudice has a 4.29.) The reviews were largely positive, even in the snooty New York Times, where a critic argued that Hannah’s “superpower is her ability to hook you along from catastrophe to catastrophe, sometimes peering between your fingers, because you simply cannot give up on her characters.”
I enjoy women’s fiction that’s also historical fiction, and am always curious about books in this subgenre that are brave enough to test out settings that, if treated honestly and interestingly, might provoke difficult political reactions among contemporary readers. Sure, you can set your historical novel during World War II or the reign of Henry VIII—to popular fiction readers, these are familiar, “safe” historical milieus that feel like wallpaper by now. But The Women is set during Vietnam, a more difficult moment in history to digest into safe genre storytelling; writers tend to tread carefully when dealing with this war, or the 19th-century American West, or other knotty moments in history, and for good reason.
And then I read The Women. Hoo boy! Remember when It Ends With Us hit movie theaters this year, and a wave of people unfamiliar with Colleen Hoover cracked her books and started posting incredulously about how simultaneously melodramatic and wooden they feel? That was how I felt reading, presumably, the one millionth copy of The Women sold by St. Martin’s Press. The Women is just like a Colleen Hoover—in fact, it’s worse, because the trauma being described is not only personal, but world-historical in scale. Imagine a Colleen Hoover novel, with an idealistic young heroine who has horrible things happen to her over and over—and then someone says, “I heard rumors of something bad up near My Lai.”
The story starts in 1966. Twenty-year-old Frankie McGrath is a younger daughter in a wealthy Coronado Island family that prides itself on a tradition of military service. Hoping to impress her parents, Frankie enlists as a nurse in the Army. Her brother is also on his way to Vietnam, but is killed in action before Frankie can get over there to start her tour. Only the first third of the book takes place in Vietnam, where Frankie weathers the stress of her new job, learns to tolerate unsanitary conditions and awful food, becomes a really good nurse, and befriends her roommates, fellow nurses Barb (Black, from Georgia) and Ethel (white, from Virginia). She falls in love twice, only to see both men disappear in action. She goes from being an FNG to an old hand, and sees lots of men she knows die on stretchers.
Hannah seems to have wanted to make this story more about change in American society than about Vietnam per se, and has assigned Frankie avatar status. Here’s a child of privilege, who has a window into what the war is doing to American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians, yet who always has a wealthy family to fall back on. She says of the men who die under her care: “The majority were Black or Hispanic or poor, straight out of high school. They didn’t have parents who could pull strings to get them out of service.” Frankie is also a safe portal for us to observe some of the dire things about Vietnam, but always the dire things you’ve vaguely heard of before, like the effects of napalm. Indeed, at one point, the word “napalm” gets a whole paragraph all to itself, just so you can see how terrible it is.
Napalm.
In the following scene, as she’s holding a burned infant as the baby dies, Frankie says, “I’m so sorry, baby,” and thinks, “How could this be done, even in the name of war?” The baby’s namelessness upsets her. “No one will ever know who this child was,” she thinks. But this book is not in the business of giving this baby, or any other Vietnamese person, a name—just in the business of gesturing toward a death, and feeling bad about it. If Frankie’s reactions to holding an infant horribly killed by American airstrikes seem oddly muted, the charitable interpretation is that she’s stressed and compartmentalizing. The uncharitable interpretation is that this is the kind of book where characters feel only one emotion at a time. Reading The Women feels like consuming a series of Facebook memes or conservative copypasta, chock-full of incoherent political opinions, reactionary positions, and incomprehensible actions taken by humans who barely seem real.
Most of the story takes place after Frankie’s return, and you can see that Hannah probably made this choice out of authorly ambition. It is certainly harder to read this part, without the inherent drama of wartime to push a reader along; all the bluntness of the characterizations and choices around setting become more and more obvious. Frankie was destined (her mother hoped, and she vaguely assumed) for marriage and a family, but postwar she can’t manage to get her life together, struggling through periods of depression, dating inappropriate men, struggling to hold down a job, and, finally, becoming addicted to pills. Like the most abject Colleen Hoover heroine, she hits rock bottom too many times to count. While Barb stabilizes herself by becoming politically active (joining, of course, the most well-known of the pacifist veterans’ organizations, Vietnam Veterans Against the War—this book always goes for the low-hanging fruit), and Ethel gets married, Frankie can’t seem to figure out what kind of person she should be.
Frankie’s trajectory might be mistaken for a trenchant portrayal of the veteran experience post-Vietnam, except for the straw men that Hannah strews across the American landscape: those damn dirty hippies. In The Women, the children of the Summer of Love seem barely to have time to drop acid, so busy are they harassing and spitting upon Frankie when they see her in her uniform. The “spat-upon Vietnam veteran” has a history so contested that it has been the subject of an academic monograph and has its own Wikipedia page. Without stepping into the debate over whether this even ever happened in real life, I will simply report that in The Women, Frankie arrives home at LAX after her tour, and in the course of her trip back home to San Diego is spat upon four times, called a “Nazi bitch” and a “baby killer,” and left alone on the street as taxis speed by, refusing to pick her up.
I lost track of how many times Frankie tries to seek help from support groups or veterans’ organizations for her PTSD, depression, and addiction, only to be turned away by someone who says a version of the statement: “There were no women in Vietnam.” The little scene recurs so often, it starts to feel eternal. Surely at some point, she could have shown someone her military ID? Women were unappreciated, I know, but in historical fiction, a bit of direct observation of that fact goes a long way.
The story reaches a fever pitch of unbelievability in its resolutions of Frankie’s two romances. (Spoilers ahead, but you have got to hear how these work out.) Recall that both of her beaux were service members injured or captured in-country—men Frankie presumed to be dead. Would you believe that each one of them comes back? Would you believe that the book ends at the unveiling of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.? Would you believe Frankie looks for her love interest’s name on the memorial, and right as she’s scanning the granite to find it, he presents himself to her, after years of allowing her to believe that he is dead, because he just “wasn’t ready”? Once again Hannah makes a paragraph out of a single word: “miraculous.”
Miraculous.
That’s one way to put it!
