Bewitching in its tidy spareness and splendidly light touch.
A Whartonesque novel of manners about a group of pretty, self-absorbed, rich young people in New York City in the merry mid-1920s.
Prohibition doesn’t cramp this set’s style as they cruise around downtown to speakeasies in their parents’ fancy cars and to parties at the Waldorf. A faux pas can change everything in a moment, though, as it does for Lizzie Carswell, who is seen stepping out of the Gramercy Park Hotel one Sunday morning with Billy Holmes after his roaring party the night before. Billy is supposed to be engaged to Clara Hart, the wedding just weeks off, though Billy is a wild drinker and tends to disappear for long stretches, as he does after this party. The mystery of the night is compounded by Lizzie’s flight to Europe, where her mother has presumably already abandoned the family. Meanwhile, mutual friends Mary Nell, the sensible, single protagonist, and awkward romantic Iris Ogleby (both saw Lizzie that morning and probably leaked the news, though they swore they wouldn’t) have gotten permission to sail to Europe with Betsy Owen, an older woman “who wrote novels about New York with jaggedly exacting prose and minute, if sometimes recognizable detail.” Also joining them is Betsy’s handsome nephew Geoffrey Rice, a soldier wounded in the war in France, who plays court to Mary publicly, though he has other ideas about love once they’re in Paris. In fact, the tension throughout this exquisitely calibrated story is between the public and the private—what’s known and what’s kept secret—and Mary and Iris have much to learn about judging appearances, especially regarding the attentions of the opposite sex. The palette is deliberately flat, the prose seemingly transparent and superficial. There is, supposedly, a whole messy world roiling beneath, but Ephron (White Rose, 1999, etc.) allows only a delicate, tasteful glimpse.
Bewitching in its tidy spareness and splendidly light touch.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-058552-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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