Relies too much on its characters’ famous names to hold the reader’s attention.
Stead (Talking About O’Dwyer, 2000, etc.) takes a fellow New Zealander, short-story master Katherine Mansfield, as the protagonist of his listless tenth novel.
Not that the three years of Mansfield’s life covered here aren’t eventful: her beloved brother, Leslie Beauchamp, dies while giving grenade instruction to fellow soldiers in France; she spends a few days in the war zone making love with a French officer during one of the many low points in her ambivalent relationship with English literary man John (Jack) Middleton Murry; and the story closes in 1918 with her realization that she has TB, which the epilogue reminds us killed her five years later. But the focus is relentlessly inward; each chapter takes us inside the thoughts of a separate individual—Mansfield, Beauchamp, Murry, their friend Fred Goodyear (who also dies in the war), Frieda Lawrence, Dora Carrington—each one musing about their conflicted feelings in a way not nearly as interesting as the pioneering fiction of Mansfield herself or of Frieda’s husband. D.H. Lawrence is depicted at work during this period on Women in Love, based in part on his and Frieda’s charged friendship with Mansfield and Murry, but none of that novel’s stormy passion seeps into these pages. It’s all rather bloodless, right down to the parade of literary friends who make desultory appearances. T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley and Lytton Strachey are no more than sketches drawn from the ample shelf of books on this overstudied crowd; even “Bertie” Russell’s mildly amorous pursuit of Mansfield is . . . mild. Stead does manage a few sharp passages on Mansfield’s work, as she thinks over the urgings of Goodyear and D.H. Lawrence to move beyond being “too smart at the expense of common mortals” and concludes, “better honest about what I see around me . . . than a gypsy violinist playing oh so feelingly off the note.” That’s not enough of a revelation to redeem an excessively low-key narrative.
Relies too much on its characters’ famous names to hold the reader’s attention.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-09-946865-4
Page Count: 245
Publisher: Vintage UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
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