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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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