This odd book stands to anger Lucille Ball’s fans and bemuse Darin Strauss’.
A fictionalized version of Lucille Ball’s life, including a love affair with the author’s grandfather.
For decades, Strauss, the author of the award-winning memoir Half a Life (2010) as well as novels including Chang and Eng (2000), has been obsessed with the fact that his grandfather Isidore Strauss might have met Lucille Ball at a 1949 party thrown by Donald Trump’s father to celebrate the destruction of the Pavilion of Fun on Coney Island. The complicated concoction of memoir and fiction that has emerged from this spark of inspiration interweaves imagined scenes from Ball’s life on and off the set with imagined scenes from his grandfather’s. Between these chapters, he slips in vignettes of what seems to be memoir, documenting his earlier attempts to bring attention to this passion project. The novel begins at Trump’s party, written up in a highly stylized, flashy prose style: “Hey, that’s your favorite celebrity over there. On the boardwalk, her white shoes scuffed black with sand. (If she’s not famous now, just wait.) She’s striding—confidenting—right into this party.” Before the night’s over, Desi Arnaz will have punched Isidore Strauss in the eye. What follows incorporates impressive research into the progress of Ball’s career—the author hopes to “remind people that Lucille Ball starred in America’s first big-time interracial love story; was the first powerful woman in Hollywood; that she owned more movie sets at one point than did any movie studio.” However, in addition to grafting his made-up story onto the facts of Ball’s life, he admits to monkeying with other details, which undercuts even the informational aims of the book. Mingling fictional characters with famous historical ones worked to brilliant effect in E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime and many similar novels since, but this feels more like a thought experiment than a compelling story. The jaunty narrator is not just omniscient, but presumptuous and intrusive, spending a good deal of time in the characters’ heads, confidently reporting their thoughts. In a scene in which Ball is having sexual intercourse with the author’s grandfather, Strauss has her meditate on why she likes him so much. “Really, it was the fucking. It’s hard not to love something you’re really good at. She was really good at that.” Oof.
This odd book stands to anger Lucille Ball’s fans and bemuse Darin Strauss’.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9276-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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 welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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