Luis Alberto Urrea has long written under the sway of family. In The Hummingbird’s Daughter (2005) and Queen of America (2011), he used fiction to re-create, or reinvent, the life of his great-aunt Teresita, otherwise known as the Saint of Cabora—a Mexican mystic and insurrectionist. His 2018 novel, The House of Broken Angels, took inspiration from the death of his eldest brother. “All we do, mija,” he observes there, “is love. Love is the answer. Nothing stops it. Not borders. Not death.”
Something similar might be said of the author’s new book, Good Night, Irene, which grows out of the experience of his mother, Phyllis, who volunteered for the Red Cross in 1943 and was assigned to the Clubmobile Corps, a unit of women who traveled with American soldiers, often to the front lines, where they served coffee and doughnuts, played records, and offered support to weary troops. As Urrea explains in the novel’s promotional materials, “she and her truck mates were recognized as the foremost women in battle in World War II and were among the fewer than 250 elite Clubmobile women who accompanied the push through France, Belgium, and Germany after D-Day.” The Clubmobiles were converted military vehicles, something like armored food trucks.
It’s a history about which I knew nothing until I read Urrea’s book.
Good Night, Irene is not a fictionalized portrait in the manner of The Hummingbird’s Daughter and Queen of America, although Urrea’s mother (or a character with her name) does make a running series of cameos. Rather, the book aspires to a more elusive approach to fiction, imagining the lives of two women: the titular Irene, a well-bred Staten Islander escaping both her own mother and a violent fiancé, and Dorothy, an Indiana farmer’s daughter who lost her brother at Pearl Harbor. Urrea makes clear the stakes from the outset; as Irene travels by train from Penn Station to Washington, D.C. for training, she meets a soldier who has returned from the Pacific with a prosthetic leg. “Listen,” he tells her. “If you get to come home, you will be so grateful you won’t realize at first that you survived. But once you know you survived, you’ll only be starting to understand.”
That’s a prophetic statement, for the war Irene and Dorothy are joining is a bloodbath, where death haunts every moment, and the reprieves are as brief as they are sweet. Equally important, the soldier’s words presage a bigger commonality, reminding us of what is shared on every side. “We’re all the same up there,” an American fighter pilot nicknamed Handyman points out. (It’s no spoiler to reveal that he and Irene become involved.) “You’re all alone up there.… And you know that they are, too. And there is nothing friendly anywhere.” His words remind me of George Orwell’s 1945 essay “Revenge Is Sour,” which describes an encounter with a dead German soldier “lying supine” near a rural footbridge. “His face was a waxy yellow,” Orwell recalls. “On his breast someone had laid a bunch of the lilac which was blossoming everywhere.”
A death is a death; that’s the idea here. Each, no matter whose, diminishes our humanity. At the same time, Urrea, not unlike Orwell, writes with a vivid sense of moral outrage, especially toward the end of the novel, when at the request of General George S. Patton, Irene and Dorothy arrive at the freshly liberated death camp at Buchenwald, where the inhumanity of the Nazis and their atrocities is finally exposed.
Still, even confronting a trauma so profound it seems irreconcilable, Urrea’s characters find—they have to—some kind of continuity or thread.
“After we went up to that death camp,” Dorothy says, “I think I broke. I was already feeling bad. So bad. So much. And then to be there and know there was nothing I could do—that I could not help a single person.” Then something miraculous happens, and Dorothy finds a baby in a boxcar, abandoned yet surviving amid the countless dead. “Do you get it, Irene?” she continues. “It can’t be about killing. It has to be about living. Saving even one life.”
I’ll confess it’s hard for me to read that line—in addition to many others in the novel—without considering the state of the nation in which we presently find ourselves. After the anti-vaxxers and the election deniers, can we even imagine the sacrifices necessary for a collective effort such as the one Good Night, Irene invokes? Urrea, too, appears attuned to this; while he doesn’t soften or sugarcoat the segregationist or misogynist attitudes of World War II America, he pushes back in subtle ways. After Dorothy notices bruises on Irene’s wrist (the legacy of that fiancé), she says, “Hope you stabbed him.” The dynamic is echoed 300 pages later, when a soldier named Swede makes a crack about Irene and Dorothy leaps out of the Clubmobile to fight him.
“Help her,” Irene begs the men who are watching.
“Her?” one responds. “Lady, she’s kicking his ass.”
The sequence is important for a lot of reasons, not least because it allows for some comic relief. As a war novel, Good Night, Irene must move through a variety of registers, reflecting exhaustion and elation as well as gut-churning existential fear. Urrea is more effective at the former than the latter; his battle scenes can seem unnecessarily extended, overplayed. So, too, the book’s closing section, which seeks to function as a coda but ultimately feels more melodramatic than it should.
Nevertheless, as an account of a little-known piece of World War II history and a tribute not only to the author’s mother but also to all the veterans of the Clubmobile Corps, Good Night, Irene is moving and affecting, featuring characters with whom we cannot help but engage. “Women,” Urrea writes, “are called upon to piece the broken world back together. The boys blow everything up. Including themselves. And then the rest of us. And we bind it all back together—the boys, the world, ourselves.”•
Little Brown and Company GOOD NIGHT, IRENE, BY LUIS ALBERTO URREA
