A marvel of intelligent design, and a truly original cautionary tale, from one of the most interesting and unconventional of...
Shadows revealed by X-ray machines and generated by the gathering momentum of World War I darken and enrich the texture of Barrett’s demanding, rewarding sixth novel (Servants of the Map, 2002, etc.).
Featuring descendants of characters in her earlier books, it’s a crowded group portrait filled by the patients, staff and outside “help” brought together in 1916 at a tuberculosis sanatorium (Tamarack State) in the Adirondacks of upstate New York. Narrated by the patients (identified only as “we”), it describes the facility and its operation, gradually narrowing focus to concentrate on recent Polish-German immigrant Leo Marburg (whose peregrinations have prevented him from completing an education in chemistry), his fellow patient and eventual antagonist, wealthy cement-plant owner Miles Fairchild (who resides in a comfortable “cure house” outside Tamarack State), as well as the three women who touch, and alter, both men’s lives. This trio includes X-ray technician Irene (a victim of the new science she has mastered), who welcomes Leo as a promising kindred spirit; teenaged Naomi (who becomes Miles’s driver, but not the sweetheart he yearns for); and “ward maid” Eudora, who arouses in Leo the passions Naomi (who loves him, and not Miles) cannot arouse. Mounting evidence that the United States will enter the European war (very skillfully layered in) heightens tensions, as do the presence of a tin box entrusted to Leo’s care, a fire of suspicious origins and Miles’s patriotic fervor, which turns weekly discussion groups he has organized into a proving ground for one’s loyalty. This richly detailed, highly intelligent novel is too slowly paced to elicit reader interest early on, but it builds and persuades most impressively, creating a compelling picture of how “together, without noticing exactly what was happening, we’d contributed to destroying our own world.”
A marvel of intelligent design, and a truly original cautionary tale, from one of the most interesting and unconventional of all contemporary American writers.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-393-06108-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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
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
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