All the Dead Yale Men: A Novel
*Starred Review* “Long-awaited” is an overused phrase in publishers’ promotional blurbs, but Nova’s follow-up to his acclaimed 1982 novel The Good Son merits that description as much as any recent fiction, and it has been well worth the lengthy wait. Nova now brings forward more than one full generation his account of the Mackinnon family. The Good Son told the story of Pop Mackinnon and his son, Chip. Here we have Chip, a former WWII POW turned spook; his son, Frank, a prosecuting attorney in Boston; and Frank’s daughter, Pia, and her boyfriends. The Mackinnons’ roots are in a richly described Delaware Valley, but this dark saga is also set in a seamy New England familiar to readers of George V. Higgins’ classic The Friends of Eddie Coyle or Geoffrey Wolff’s Providence. It is told with comparable verve, wit, horror, and beauty—even when vulgar, even repellent—and with images and set pieces that will haunt the reader long after theyve put the book down. This gripping and intelligent chronicle of love, legacy, and betrayal (the title may suggest a genre mystery, which this surely isn’t) captures a complex clan entangled in a questionable moral universe. Nova’s Mackinnons, both here and in The Good Son, leave their edgy mark on the modern American literary landscape. --Mark Levine