No One Thinks of Greenland » (First Edition)

John Griesemer’s fiction has been published in Gettysburg Review, Glimmer Train, Boulevard, Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. No One Thinks of Greenland is his first novel. He is currently at work on his second book, an epic historical novel about the laying of the transatlantic cable. He lives with his family in Lyme, New Hampshire.

"You'll want to scratch" These spoken words open to us the strange and beguiling world of young corporal Rudy Spruance, forced to join the military due to a mysterious past, and sent for some unexplainable reason to a top-secret military hospital in Greenland. There he meets a wide cast of unusual and colorful characters, outcasts and rejects all, begins to fall for the commanding officer's leggy and strong-willed girlfriend, and slowly uncovers the awful secret behind the portion of the base dubbed "The Wing."

It is a world where glaciers crouch on the horizon, icebergs float along the bay, and polar bears must be chased away from the local dump. It is also a place where conflicting forces intersect, where history, so long held at bay, begins to encroach, and a place that in several month's time will be submerged in an endless night, affectionately termed "The Stark Raving Dark." In the grand tradition of Joseph Heller and Ken Kesey, No One Things of Greenland is the hair-raising and hilarious story of one man's desperate attempts to find his place in a mad, mad world.

Publishers Weekly

It's 1959 at the start of this intelligent first novel, and the Korean War has been over for six years, but the horribly mutilated casualties hidden away in an obscure military hospital on the U.S. Army base at Qangattarsa, Greenland, are still living with its consequences. The Wing, as the hospital is called, is run by Col. Lane Woolwrap, a half-mad bureaucratic genius who equips the place with oak paneling and Tiffany lamps. Assigned to his command is army misfit Rudy Spruance, an information officer relegated to Qangattarsa for reasons unknown. Woolwrap orders Rudy to start a newspaper to boost morale, but Rudy's journalistic investigations uncover unpleasant facts about the history and the future of the hospital's patients. Qangattarsa is a mysterious and disorienting place, and the harsh Greenland landscape undermines the soldiers' sanity; glaciers move menacingly in the night, hordes of mosquitoes attack and the long polar darkness of winter is hard to bear. Griesemer is at his best describing the strange recreational activities that occupy the Greenland troops: chasing polar bears in jeeps, throwing beer blasts that degenerate into fistfights and public nudity. In its manic moments, the book recalls the topsy-turvy military worlds of Catch-22 and M*A*S*H, though it doesn't quite reach the subversive heights of its predecessors. Rudy's love affair with Sgt. Irene Teal, the colonel's aide and companion, is conventional, and where Heller's Yossarian was an inspired antihero, forging his own moral code in order to cope with his surreal surroundings, Rudy takes a more standard route, fighting for the weak against a malevolent system. Still, his struggle is a compelling one, as post-Korea and Vietnam revelations make the conspiracies imagined here near-plausible. Regional author tour. (May) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.