The Reason You’re Alive

Matthew Quick Picador €19.85 At 68, narrator David Granger is recovering from brain surgery and soon reveals how he has been haunted for years by his savagery in the Vietnam War, his wife’s early death and a fellow soldier he wronged. Matthew Quick shows a deep sympathy for the darkness veterans live with as Granger and others cope with war’s psychological fallout. On the lighter side, Quick gets some comic mileage from the vet’s mini-rants on his son’s Dutch wife, doctors, French people, Jane Fonda, Iranians, Gandhi and global warming. Some readers may even hear echoes of Trump, for better or worse.