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Oh, Johnny
Johnny Wrigley, a newly minted United States Marine, finds himself on a troop train headed for California - and then to an island in the Pacific where he is going to kill some "Japs" for America. During a brief coffee and donut stop in Kansas City, Johnny finds himself sexually involved with a young girl as innocent as he is. As Johnny fights in a brutal war, then slowly resumes his life back home, he never forgets the girl at the railroad station.
- GenresFiction
277 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
About the author
Jim Lehrer
44 books40 followersJames Charles Lehrer was an American journalist and the news anchor for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS, known for his role as a frequent debate moderator during elections. Lehrer was an author of non-fiction and fiction, drawing from his experiences and interests in history and politics.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
March 23, 2012
If you strip it down far enough, there’s an interesting premise underneath Jim Lehrer’s novel Oh, Johnny. An ignorant but gifted center fielder postpones a minor league career to join the Marines in 1944, falls in love, survives the war, and comes home to find his dreams don’t play out like he dreamt them. Unfortunately, the execution is lacking, with the childish narration masking the dark undertones of war and its psychological ramifications.
The book opens with Johnny Wrigley heading west from his native Maryland on a troop train, en route to his final destination in the Pacific. At a 30-minute stop in Wichita, he disembarks and immediately falls in love with the most beautiful girl he’s ever laid eyes on. The dust jacket states “they share an intimacy that Johnny will treasure for the next two years at war.” Sharing might be putting it strongly. Two chapters into the story we trip over the book’s first–and highest–credibility hurdle: Why an innocent Kansas girl would let Johnny deflower her in a train station storage room.
When their two minutes of passion are over, Johnny proclaims his sincere love while Betsy weeps and prays for forgiveness. He zips up and bolts for his train, which is now pulling out of the station. His seatmate, who just half an hour earlier was inquiring whether Johnny had ever done “it,” now smells the guilty pleasure (despite being a virgin himself) as his friend slides past. Johnny, oblivious to the torture he has put his beloved through, is off in dreamland.
His “Betsy luck” somehow keeps him alive through the horrors of Peleliu and Okinawa. When Johnny returns from the war he stops in Kansas and searches for her to no avail. He does happen to stumble into Lawrence Stadium, home of the National Baseball Congress Championship, which miracle of miracles, he plays in the very next year as a member of the Blue Ridge Drivers, the semi-pro club he’s had to settle for after a horrific collision with the center-field wall knocked him out of the minor leagues.
Johnny’s master plan to locate his Betsy is to ask his coach to somehow get his picture in the newspaper so she’ll find him. His scheme works, though it turns out she’s quite different from the fantasy he’d remembered. After obsessing over her for three years, he can’t get away from her fast enough. He returns to Maryland sadder and wiser, and it’s here that the book gathers a little steam. Unfortunately, it’s almost over.
When Johnny’s anguish from the war and his baseball injuries seeps through he finally gains some character. After coming off as a cross between Forrest Gump and Dobie Gillis for the first 200 pages, Johnny at last merits a little empathy. On the whole, however, it’s too little, too late.
Oh, Johnny might have worked better in comic book format. The inane references to his hero Pistol Pete Reiser might not be quite so irksome in a dialogue balloon. I counted 30 mentions of Reiser and nearly as many to “Miracle Whip,” which in Johnny and his grocer mother’s lingo means something really special or miraculous. In my lingo it’s a fine substitute for “annoying, cornball redundancy.”
Most of the baseball action in Oh, Johnny could fit in a Matt Christopher book. Unfortunately, this isn’t The Kid Who Only Hit Homers. Equally implausible most of the time, but without the endearing qualities.
This is Lehrer’s 19th novel. He’s better known as the anchor of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. I can’t speak to his previous 18 releases, but based on this one, I prefer him behind a news desk.
The book opens with Johnny Wrigley heading west from his native Maryland on a troop train, en route to his final destination in the Pacific. At a 30-minute stop in Wichita, he disembarks and immediately falls in love with the most beautiful girl he’s ever laid eyes on. The dust jacket states “they share an intimacy that Johnny will treasure for the next two years at war.” Sharing might be putting it strongly. Two chapters into the story we trip over the book’s first–and highest–credibility hurdle: Why an innocent Kansas girl would let Johnny deflower her in a train station storage room.
When their two minutes of passion are over, Johnny proclaims his sincere love while Betsy weeps and prays for forgiveness. He zips up and bolts for his train, which is now pulling out of the station. His seatmate, who just half an hour earlier was inquiring whether Johnny had ever done “it,” now smells the guilty pleasure (despite being a virgin himself) as his friend slides past. Johnny, oblivious to the torture he has put his beloved through, is off in dreamland.
His “Betsy luck” somehow keeps him alive through the horrors of Peleliu and Okinawa. When Johnny returns from the war he stops in Kansas and searches for her to no avail. He does happen to stumble into Lawrence Stadium, home of the National Baseball Congress Championship, which miracle of miracles, he plays in the very next year as a member of the Blue Ridge Drivers, the semi-pro club he’s had to settle for after a horrific collision with the center-field wall knocked him out of the minor leagues.
Johnny’s master plan to locate his Betsy is to ask his coach to somehow get his picture in the newspaper so she’ll find him. His scheme works, though it turns out she’s quite different from the fantasy he’d remembered. After obsessing over her for three years, he can’t get away from her fast enough. He returns to Maryland sadder and wiser, and it’s here that the book gathers a little steam. Unfortunately, it’s almost over.
When Johnny’s anguish from the war and his baseball injuries seeps through he finally gains some character. After coming off as a cross between Forrest Gump and Dobie Gillis for the first 200 pages, Johnny at last merits a little empathy. On the whole, however, it’s too little, too late.
Oh, Johnny might have worked better in comic book format. The inane references to his hero Pistol Pete Reiser might not be quite so irksome in a dialogue balloon. I counted 30 mentions of Reiser and nearly as many to “Miracle Whip,” which in Johnny and his grocer mother’s lingo means something really special or miraculous. In my lingo it’s a fine substitute for “annoying, cornball redundancy.”
Most of the baseball action in Oh, Johnny could fit in a Matt Christopher book. Unfortunately, this isn’t The Kid Who Only Hit Homers. Equally implausible most of the time, but without the endearing qualities.
This is Lehrer’s 19th novel. He’s better known as the anchor of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. I can’t speak to his previous 18 releases, but based on this one, I prefer him behind a news desk.
January 6, 2013
I originally picked up the book because it was written by Jim Lehrer. Jim should stick to the News Hour. Johnny seemed one dimensional to me. He was obsessed with finding "Betsey" when he got home from the war and the obsession seemed a bit silly. Just a little too much baseball for me. I found myself reading fast not because it was good but because I just wanted it over with.
April 28, 2026
If I don't write a review I probably won't remember having read this book. Like the character's life itself, there was a lot of potential that fizzled out. Lehrer goes into some, but not too much detail about the battles Johnny fought in as a Marine in the Pacific. He then shows some of the PTSD (as it would eventually be called) and survivor's guilt Johnny feels as he tries to pick his life back up, and manages to mangle both his body and his life.
The highlight of the novel is showing that in the absence of any organized help for veterans dealing with trauma post-war, several veterans see Johnny and recognize what he's going through, and help him in their own way. They talk about it and listen to him when they need to, they don't when neither of them can't. I would assume that's a very realistic depiction of the situation.
The highlight of the novel is showing that in the absence of any organized help for veterans dealing with trauma post-war, several veterans see Johnny and recognize what he's going through, and help him in their own way. They talk about it and listen to him when they need to, they don't when neither of them can't. I would assume that's a very realistic depiction of the situation.
October 1, 2019
Oh, Johnny, wasn't the best book I've read, but it also wasn't the worst. Jim Lehrer has written other fiction books that were better. One of the interesting aspects of this book is that it told the stories of the gruesomeness of war. War is not pretty, and this book does touch on the impact of what veterans go through when they return from the duty of being in war. It doesn't matter that this book takes place just after WWII because the atrocities of war even if it is Iraq or Afghanistan war is gruesome.
I picked this book up hoping this would be a great baseball story wound within, and to me, the story of baseball is just a sidebar. The baseball section could have been left out or developed further.
I picked this book up hoping this would be a great baseball story wound within, and to me, the story of baseball is just a sidebar. The baseball section could have been left out or developed further.
May 25, 2009
Dark tale of arrested youth and dreams crippled by war.
Johnny Wrigley is eighteen years old, a marine and on his way to the Pacific theater. During a 20-minute stop in Kansas Johnny meets Betsy, one of the hostesses offering cigarettes and apples to the soldiers on their way to the front. Johnny falls in love with Betsy and promises he’ll come back, taking with him the memory of a few minutes in the storage room when he and Betsy lose their virginity together. Johnny runs to catch the train as it’s pulling out of the station and writes letters to his Betsy in his head from Kansas all the way through training as a flamethrower operator on Peleliu, one of the worst hellholes in the Pacific theater. The only thing Johnny believes kept him alive is Betsy, his lucky girl. His one thought is to go back to Kansas, marry her and pick up where he left off, moving up the ranks from the minors to the majors in baseball. Fate has other plans for Johnny.
Johnny Wrigley’s story is a straight forward, no frills, first-person account of a young man changed by war. Jim Lehrer’s prose is spare and echoes the vernacular of the 1940s, rife with cultural and social references that bring Oh, Johnny to life. There is a darker side to Johnny’s tale, one that parallels ultimate happiness and the specters of war, changing everything.
After the war, Johnny is unable to grow up, caught in limbo between life before the war and what remains for him after surviving the horrors that cling to him like a spectral after image. He meets a veteran of the European theater and thereafter refuses to look in the mirror, afraid he’ll see the same haunted eyes and war ravaged soul peering back at him. Instead, he clings to his memories of Betsy, determined to find her. He believes that she will save him and bring him back to life.
Oh, Johnny is dark with glimmers of hope tarnished by reality told in bare and frank language without embroidery or embellishments. The horrors are as starkly matter-of-fact as the crude and immature references to sex that bear the stamp of unvarnished reality.
Johnny Wrigley is eighteen years old, a marine and on his way to the Pacific theater. During a 20-minute stop in Kansas Johnny meets Betsy, one of the hostesses offering cigarettes and apples to the soldiers on their way to the front. Johnny falls in love with Betsy and promises he’ll come back, taking with him the memory of a few minutes in the storage room when he and Betsy lose their virginity together. Johnny runs to catch the train as it’s pulling out of the station and writes letters to his Betsy in his head from Kansas all the way through training as a flamethrower operator on Peleliu, one of the worst hellholes in the Pacific theater. The only thing Johnny believes kept him alive is Betsy, his lucky girl. His one thought is to go back to Kansas, marry her and pick up where he left off, moving up the ranks from the minors to the majors in baseball. Fate has other plans for Johnny.
Johnny Wrigley’s story is a straight forward, no frills, first-person account of a young man changed by war. Jim Lehrer’s prose is spare and echoes the vernacular of the 1940s, rife with cultural and social references that bring Oh, Johnny to life. There is a darker side to Johnny’s tale, one that parallels ultimate happiness and the specters of war, changing everything.
After the war, Johnny is unable to grow up, caught in limbo between life before the war and what remains for him after surviving the horrors that cling to him like a spectral after image. He meets a veteran of the European theater and thereafter refuses to look in the mirror, afraid he’ll see the same haunted eyes and war ravaged soul peering back at him. Instead, he clings to his memories of Betsy, determined to find her. He believes that she will save him and bring him back to life.
Oh, Johnny is dark with glimmers of hope tarnished by reality told in bare and frank language without embroidery or embellishments. The horrors are as starkly matter-of-fact as the crude and immature references to sex that bear the stamp of unvarnished reality.
June 14, 2012
Oh, Johnny is the story of an up-and-coming baseball player who joins the military and is shipped out. Just before leaving, he meets a sweet girl at the station and they have a moment of passion together. He spends all of his time serving thinking of her and using her memory to keep him going. When he comes back, things are not quite what he expected them to be.
The premise of this story is good, but it is not well written. The main character is very unrealistic, and laughably naive about everything to the point that he comes off as slightly mentally deficient. There are long rambling stretches that seem to only be there to show the passage of time, but they're boring stretches. I did not enjoy this book.
The premise of this story is good, but it is not well written. The main character is very unrealistic, and laughably naive about everything to the point that he comes off as slightly mentally deficient. There are long rambling stretches that seem to only be there to show the passage of time, but they're boring stretches. I did not enjoy this book.
May 30, 2009
Not your typical Jim Lehrer novel--it deals with the lasting effects of the horrors of war and reality vs fantasy. Well written but disturbing.
June 5, 2009
The author could have done so much more. This book had pieces of a good story that just ended and thats it!
July 23, 2009
Entertaining. A quick read which I passed on to my husband. I have reserved some other books by Jim Lehrer. Who knew he was writing novels? Not me. And this was #17 or 18, I think.
August 27, 2009
A very quick and reasonably enjoyable read. Lehrer's description of WW II era "shell shock" is interesting and well done.
September 1, 2009
I like Jim Lehrer's novels better than his newshour on TV. I enjoy his everyday unsung heroes and how he keeps the spirit of the WWII vets alive in my mind
September 21, 2009
Quick read. 1st novel I've read by Jim Lehrer. Theme around WWII, first love, and pro baseball will resonate with history buffs.
October 27, 2009
an easy read ... but didnt make me hungry to read more of his ...
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October 3, 2016nice quick read
April 3, 2010
Fun read.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews