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Copyright 2001 The Hartford Courant Company THE HARTFORD COURANT June 10, 2001 Sunday, STATEWIDE SECTION: ARTS; Pg. G2 HEADLINE: TWO WOMEN OF 'NEW YORK'; 'GREENLAND' CONVENTIONAL; LIFE DETAILS IN 'CHANCE' BODY: A small, unlikely historical fact forms the basis of John Griesemer's fantastical first novel, "No One Thinks of Greenland" (Picador, $24): In the 1950s, American soldiers wounded in the Korean War were exported to a military hospital in Narsarssuaq, Greenland. But for this realistic nucleus, the Qangattarsa military base is an unearthly place. Corporal Rudy Spruance finds himself assigned as a public information officer to a clandestine base that cannot acknowledge its own existence, much less put out press releases, even if it had news to report, which it does not. Spruance is loath to leave because he has fallen for the boss's girlfriend, Sergeant Irene Teal, whom he recklessly romances while trying to fill a newsless paper. Rudy discovers the Wing, a hospital ward full of wounded men (labeled MIA by the government), or what's left of them, still languishing in Greenland nearly a decade after the war. "They looked like unfinished plasticene busts thumped, dented or squeezed by a child in frustration," Griesemer writes. Rudy's friendship with one of these soldiers, Guy X, proves even more perilous than his attraction to Sgt. Teal. "Greenland" aims for Joseph Heller and George Saunders, but while his book contains elements of the absurd and even grotesque, the pithy satire of those two authors is not so evident here. On the contrary, Rudy's basic dilemmas are almost too conventional and often reminiscent of high-school dramas: chasing the elusive-but-taken pretty girl; avoiding the bully, a brutish troop named Genteen; promoting the annual Midnight Sun Bash; championing Guy X and getting in trouble for it. Classic scholastic, institutional and political conflicts merge to create Rudy's central challenge: to get out of Greenland with the girl and the Guy. Griesemer's attempt to target both gut and intellect, sap and would-be soldier, leaves "Greenland" feeling like a postcard rather than a fully realized landscape. The book might actually benefit from a quirky screen adaptation by, say, Spike Jonze or John Sayles. Griesemer, a sometime actor, was the "voice of the football announcer" in Sayles' "Lone Star." Perhaps he's inadvertently written himself a more sizeable film role. -- Christina Nunez
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