Humane, witty, and bold, this novel imagines the life of a loving but tortured couple.
To the spate of novels investigating the lives of famous artists and their relationships with the people who loved them most, add this intriguing take on Tennessee Williams and his lover of 15 years, Frank Merlo.
Nicknamed the Horse by Williams for his stocky build, Merlo was a man from a working-class Italian family in New Jersey who rose to elite echelons of society through his relationship with Williams, becoming friends with, among others, Anna Magnani and Truman Capote (whom neither he nor Williams cherished). Castellani’s Merlo, with a heart that’s “big and simple and practical,” is the focus here. Merlo is fulfilled by his work for Williams—arranging the details of the scatterbrained playwright's life—but also plagued by doubts about his own purpose (“If Frank could not be the fountain, he could at least feel the spray,” Castellani writes). In portions of the novel set in 1953, Castellani imagines that the couple meets a glamorous Swedish mother and daughter, “these fierce and delicate greyhounds, with their taut slender necks,” the younger of whom, Anja Bloom, they take under their wings. She will become an international star known for her work in art house cinema, but her fame won’t soften her “haunted and hard” heart. Castellani (The Art of Perspective, 2016) shuttles between 1953, when Williams was collaborating with Paul Bowles to write the screenplay for Luchino Visconti’s Senso, and now, when Bloom’s star has faded but she is still in possession of Williams’ (imaginary) last creation, a terrible one-act play, Call It Joy, that he wrote to assuage his guilt for not visiting Merlo in the hospital in 1963 as he was dying of lung cancer. Will Bloom allow the play to be performed? In an ambitious act of ventriloquism, Castellani includes the entire script of the play here. There are only a few missteps in the novel; it is not clear, for example, why anyone would fall in love with the petty and cantankerous writer John Horne Burns.
Humane, witty, and bold, this novel imagines the life of a loving but tortured couple.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-55905-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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