A rigorous work of historical fiction weighed down by a bloated plot.
Levan’s (Give Us This Day, 2007) novel explores the personal wages of war, love, and sacrifice.
In 1992, when Christopher Levan, a minister, first came upon Gordon Davis, a former soldier of World War I, he found a broken man, mute and mad. Davis had languished in a veteran’s hospital for more than 70 years, but he began to communicate to Levan, however confusedly, in fits and starts. His story turns out to be heartbreaking. He was a ministry student at Wycliffe College in Toronto, on his way to the priesthood, when he enlisted in the military’s medical corps during the Great War. While passing through Montreal with his unit, he made the acquaintance of Bishop Terrance Hinks and his daughter, Joanna, with whom he fell deeply in love. The two pledged to marry once Davis finally returned to civilian life. The horrors of combat took their toll on Davis, but he conducted himself with notable bravery, participating in a battle against the German army at Vimy Ridge and in the bloodbath that was the Battle of Passchendaele. In December 1917, he and Joanna planned to meet at Halifax Harbour, but their plans were stymied due to a catastrophic explosion caused by a ship collision. When Davis couldn’t find her at their designated meeting place, he was prepared to scour the country to find her, but he became entangled in a political scandal involving a powerful priest. His loyalty to Joanna was subsequently tested in a way that has painful reverberations on the remainder of his days. Author Levan, who shares a name with the narrator, writes in a manner that evinces a masterful command of the historical period. He also unravels the romantic power of Davis’ connection with Joanna with patience and delicacy; for example, the character of Levan observes, “Something in those four days silenced [Davis], and it is my guess that it was not the war or the disaster that robbed him of speech. It was deeper than shock and hatred, and the only possibility that makes sense is love.” However, the author also makes the plot leap speedily back and forth in time, which results in a halting pace and a jarring lack of narrative momentum. Even after readers fully piece it together, the congested story will seem more convoluted than complex.
A rigorous work of historical fiction weighed down by a bloated plot.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4602-8115-4
Page Count: 426
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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