CONSCIENCE

Name: CONSCIENCE
Author: Alice Mattison
ISBN: 978-1-68177-789-4

by Alice Mattison ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 7, 2018

Not easy but rewarding and certainly timely; Mattison’s complex prose matches the multidimensional moral arguments raging...

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While exploring the deeply flawed yet enduring marriage of two Vietnam War–era activists now leading comfortable bourgeois lives in New Haven, Connecticut, Mattison (Nothing is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn, 2008, etc.) also tackles broader issues, including the value of risk versus caution in the name of idealism.

After falling in love as zealous student anti-war protestors, editor and literary biographer Olive—who's white and an “intermittently and selectively observant” Jew—married African-American school principal Griff, a nonpracticing Christian. Their long marriage was interrupted by several years of separation, and while their relationship has more or less recovered, Olive chafes at Griff’s irritating presence while resenting his frequent absence. Now a new marital crisis arises when Olive is assigned to write an essay concerning a novel written years earlier by her sort-of friend Val, a bestseller Val openly based on a romanticized version of the life of Olive’s close friend Helen, whose radicalism led to violent tragedy. Meanwhile, Griff is elected president of the board of a local community service center and finds himself in conflict with Jean, who runs the center. Risk-averse Griff considers Jean too “casual about trouble” while she considers him “controlling” and overcautious—and both are right. Then Jean, with whom Olive has forged a friendship, reads Val’s novel, which Griff has long avoided finishing, and notices Griff’s resemblance to a late-appearing character who influences the Helen character’s decisions. Ironically, Olive considers Griff’s self-blame for the real harm he may or may not have caused an overweening intrusion into her grief over Helen. Olive and Griff’s struggles as youthful activists balancing the limits of liberalism against the excesses of radicalism as a cure for social ills interlace with Olive's and Jean’s current efforts to define themselves emotionally within an ethical context (Griff having done so long ago). Not to mention the question they raise about whether fiction must be accurate.

Not easy but rewarding and certainly timely; Mattison’s complex prose matches the multidimensional moral arguments raging inside her prickly, multidimensional characters.

Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-68177-789-4

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Pegasus

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

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Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

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THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

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THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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Film Productions Halted Due to Coronavirus Worry

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‘The Nightingale’ Is Reese’s Book Club Pick

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.