An unpretentiously moving tale, both funny and slyly intelligent.
In this novel, a shiftless young man in Ohio sets out to find his legendarily irresponsible cousin and make peace with his own directionless life.
Marty “Cuz” Haff is infamous for his foolhardiness, “crudeness and poor judgment,” and grotesque lack of discipline. He’s a strange man who seems casually comfortable with long bouts of homelessness and claims to have a bobcat’s heart, a declaration he refuses to explain. One summer, just before his senior year of high school, Terry Haff lands a job working with his cousin Cuz at a landscape supply business and develops a genuine affection for him. Terry even comes to admire an uncompromising integrity that somehow seems to form the core of Cuz’s commitment to dissipation. Terry is a timid and unambitious teen, frantically drawn to but equally terrified of the opposite sex, and Cuz becomes a kind of loving mentor. Terry’s parents, Ed and Gladys, view Cuz through a permanent lens of suspicion yet tolerate him nonetheless, if only barely. But an accident changes everything—while at work with Cuz, Terry’s arm is brutally damaged by a soil screener, a mishap that results in “an above elbow disarticulation,” essentially a partial amputation. Ed wants Cuz held criminally responsible, but Gladys settles for his permanent banishment from the state of Ohio—he accepts his exile and moves to Arizona. Terry doesn’t hold Cuz responsible and mourns his loss, an attachment endearingly (and comically) captured by Bachmann. When Cuz disappears—he apparently sets his Airstream aflame and goes off to die quietly in the Grand Canyon—Terry becomes obsessed with rescuing him while his family remains utterly indifferent.
The author displays a talent for the dual depiction of comedy and tragedy—consider this account of Terry’s partial amputation, one that doesn’t even earn him the glow of heroism: “His wound is bereft of honor. It was a mistake born of imbalance, an ill-advised and uncoordinated heel slip in inclement weather.” Readers will be uncertain whether they should laugh or cry at Terry’s predicament, something that could be said of the entire novel, as silly as it is affecting. Bachmann eventually paints a fuller picture of Cuz, who is much more than a hapless clown. He grew up under the despotism of a brutal father, a “long-dead brute” notorious for his “cartoonish cruelty,” an upbringing that clearly left its mark. Cuz can be astonishingly thoughtful, and his peripatetic life seems philosophically principled. As he relates to Terry, “Heraclitus says everything is on fire. It took me about forty years to learn what that meant. Everything is in flux. Everything flows, nothing stands still. It’s all deteriorating right in front of your eyes, even all of us. Especially us. Our cells are deteriorating as we speak. We are all on fire.” There is no obvious lesson to be drawn from this free-wheeling story—Bachmann is far too subtle to bore readers with a condescendingly didactic sermon. Rather, he simply tells a riveting and humorous story, one that prompts reflection without imposing an imperious stamp on it. An unpretentiously moving tale, both funny and slyly intelligent.Pub Date: May 25, 2023
ISBN: 9798396041370
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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