Reed’s confident debut amiably reimagines Hawthorne’s tragic heroine as a brave lady in tumultuous times, making this sequel...
Continuation of The Scarlet Letter follows Hester Prynne and her wild daughter to Oliver Cromwell’s England.
A year after Arthur Dimmesdale confessed that Pearl was his illegitimate child comes the death of Roger Chillingworth, Hester’s vindictive estranged husband. Surprisingly, Roger’s will leaves all his substantial wealth to the girl who is not his daughter. Fearing that Pearl will never make a marriage in Puritan Boston, where she is called a witch-baby, Hester takes the eight-year-old to England. But the merry old land of her youth is gone, replaced by a dour nation under the rule of Cromwell. Dancing, theater and Christmas have been banished, and everyone wears somber gray clothes. Hester reunites with her childhood friend Mary Wright, moving with Pearl into the Wrights’ grand London house. After years of loneliness and shame, Hester and Pearl enjoy a cozy intimacy with Mary and her children. It’s when Robert Wright returns from battle in Ireland that Hester’s troubles begin. Mary’s husband is a member of Cromwell’s inner circle, and he has told the Protector of Hester’s rare gift. Since leaving Boston, she has been able to read the sin of anyone she looks at. Adulterers and hypocrites squirm in her presence, and she’s avoided at parties, but pious Cromwell uses her to root out traitors; Hester’s second sight sends many men to the Tower, to her dismay. As Cromwell becomes more paranoid and dangerous, Hester falls in with a band of Royalists (including a dashing libertine lord with whom she enjoys a casual affair) attempting to restore the monarchy. Her confidant, the newly enthroned King Charles II, helps Hester achieve her greatest wish, a good match for Pearl.
Reed’s confident debut amiably reimagines Hawthorne’s tragic heroine as a brave lady in tumultuous times, making this sequel to his literary classic a standard-issue historical novel.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-58392-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
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