It's been a quiet life ... mostly. After Korea, where things were far from quiet, Hollis and Deb got married. He worked for a lumber company 40 years, and then they retired to Arizona, where he putters around with his cactus garden and golf. Hollis' friend Lon isn't crazy about Arizona. Neither is Hollis. “It's an America that never was,” says Lon. “Just a fantasy of something imagined in hindsight, hallucinated by folks desiring safe neighborhoods, tidy lawns, no noise. I didn't know I was fighting a war for this kind of outcome ... It's like Disneyland – it's a theme park we've invested in, that's all.” We are introduced to Hollis in his bathrobe, a 68-year-old man in good health desultorily reading a Tom Clancy novel, a bottle of Glenfiddich at his side. All is well on the surface, but Hollis is restless, uneasy in his skin. There is the long, ugly scar on his thigh, the result of a battle in Korea, but Hollis has long since placed that experience where it needs to be. No, it's something else, something more serious. Deb has been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Hollis shrivels when he hears the news, while Deb keeps her composure and asks, “OK, so what do I do now?” One day, after the treatments have exhausted her, she raises her head and whispers, “Tell me about us. Will you, please, tell me about us.” What's she's asking is, what has their marriage, their life together, been about? That ruminative quest is the sum and substance of Mitch Cullin's (“A Slight Trick of the Mind”) fine new novel. Deb's request sends Hollis back reconnoitering his past and their past. She presses him to write a book about his life. She goes to the library to get him the autobiographies of Fulton Sheen and Chuck Yeager, but Hollis is the quiet, locked-up type, not a man to spend a lot of time figuring out where he's been and what the meaning was. He has, for instance, never told Deb about the apparition that began showing up just after he got home from Korea. It was a nightmare, derelict vision of himself, growing more bedraggled and threatening-looking with each visitation. Hollis began calling him Max. Mostly, Max went away after Hollis got married, yet lately he's started showed up again, suddenly appearing in the kitchen or on the golf course. The process of trying to write – or, rather, the non-process – has gotten Hollis thinking, and he begins returning to his experiences in Korea and a big, hulking guy in his unit named Bill McReedy, who referred to himself as Creed and expected everybody else to refer to him as Creed, as well. Creed was one of those guys with a big, holy John Wayne light around him, who took insane risks and never got hit, and it is Creed who is the key to so much of Hollis and Deb's life together. A marriage, if it's any good, is a partnership of equal parts eros and friendship, with one person's strengths compensating for the other's weaknesses, and vice versa. In his portrayal of Hollis and Deb, Cullin creates one of the most believable good marriages in recent fiction. Fighting her cancer, Deb buys wigs and reads all 46 of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe mysteries. Hollis dutifully picks up the jobs around the house she no longer has the energy for. To keep herself amused, she leaves him Post-it notes: “Buy Me Cheesecake Before It's Too Late,” “It's A Good Day to be Bald.” As Deb gets sicker, Hollis grows more desperate. “We will survive this, Hollis had told himself. In order to have a future together, he had needed to survive the Korean conflict, and in turn, she was obligated to draw out that future together by overcoming cancer. You have no choice, he thought. If I could survive getting shot to find you, you must survive this to keep us from being apart.” Given the story, “The Post-War Dream” can't help but be a quiet, searching book, and the frequent flashbacks to Korea shift it slightly out of focus. But after Cullin reveals the deep bond binding husband and wife, he summons a devastatingly powerful ending. Poor Hollis is haunted by the apparition of Max and haunted by the fear of losing Deb, without whom he would have become Max. There are times when love, nothing but love, seems somehow insufficient as the ultimate meaning of a life. But that is what we end up with - if we're lucky. – Cox News Service __
