Hunter's Moon - Philip Caputo

A Philip Caputo novel can always be counted on as an opportunity to get deeply inside the heads of some interesting fictional characters, a chance to remind ourselves about what makes people in the real world - including ourselves - tick. Even though some readers may still want to quibble over whether or not Hunter’s Moon is a novel or a collection of short stories despite the fact that the book explicitly labels itself "a novel in stories," there is definitely plenty to learn about human nature in Caputo's latest.

All but one of the book’s seven interconnected, chronologically-ordered stories are set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the exception being the one that takes place in a remote part of Alaska.  Oddly enough, placing one of the stories in the wilds of Alaska makes clear just how remote and wild the Upper Peninsula itself is, and why so many of the damaged souls in Caputo’s stories find some kind of comfort there.  Caputo describes northern Michigan so well that the Upper Peninsula in a way becomes the character that binds his stories together; it is the one constant between six of them and a first cousin to the Alaskan setting of the seventh.  

Author Philip Caputo

These are stories about men and women who are not quite managing to live the lives they had expected for themselves, and their disappointment shows. They include stories about a man struggling to keep a second marriage alive despite his personal demons; a father who really, really dislikes his young adult son; a son who equally dislikes his 85-year-old father with whom he can’t remember ever getting along; and others about people trying to cope with a shared act of sudden violence that forever changed their lives for the worst.  

This being a Philip Caputo book, many of its central characters are veterans of America’s recent wars, from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, and what they experienced in those wars is something they still think about every day of their lives. This is particularly true of the poignant story that closes the book, one in which a young veteran struggles to cope with the guilt that he brought home from the war with him, but it is also a theme that occurs in several of the other stories.  Even the collection's most prominent character is largely defined by what he experienced in Vietnam decades earlier.  

Hunter’s Moon is vintage Philip Caputo; his fans and longtime readers will not be disappointed.

Copy provided for review purposes by Henry Holt & Company