A richly comic, tender evocation of Ireland's dwindling, splendid Anglo-Irish. Motherless since eight, Molly Hassard, our fresh and delightful protagonist, lives with father Tibby, a charmer ``with a disinclination to face inconvenient realities,'' a man who would rather shoot himself than sit and watch his caste's slow dying. The two make their home in the Dower House, attached to the main grand house of Dromore, where live Uncle Miles, Aunt Belinda, and Molly's languid cousin Sophie, who's her own age. Aunt Belinda forthrightly rescues Dromore from demolition after Miles's father's death; his thundering will actually designated the money to have it blown to bits. The modest, ``plain'' Molly whiles away her time in Dromore chatting with the much more restless Sophie. She's lovingly but firmly infused with tribal training by Belinda, from marmalade- making to the niceties of proper dinner seating. Only two major events involve major campaigns by Belinda, the maiden aunt Vera, and their array of servants: the coming-out party of the lawyer's sweetheart, and Sophie's hasty bad marriage to a wealthy Brit. Molly seems to be marked instead for Aunt Vera-hood, or at the least for life as a humble Keeper of the Flame in architecturally pristine houses, worn and damp yet crammed anyhow with the past's beautiful ``leftovers,'' all sited within a countryside of pastoral loveliness. Instead, she heads off to school in London, lives peacefully with two ancient aunts, goes to work for an elderly author, and meets up eventually with handsome, witty, flattering Gerald. He and she slog through some failed lovemaking; and Gerald, like Sophie, is rootless, tied to no real place of his own. Finally, though, Molly finds her man and makes her home elsewhere. The author of two well-received novels and an autobiography, Walled Gardens (1989), appropriately dedicates this to William Maxwell, who can also call forth a world in a single detail. Fine and poignant.
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-17028-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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