Like its protagonist, this novel aspires to more than it achieves.
A family bursts at the seams as long-buried secrets are revealed.
Upon reading the opening scene of this debut novel, in which a one-time child TV star named Benji Fisher, reduced in boozy middle age to playing King Hamlet’s ghost in an upstate production, flees his dressing room, lurches into the woods, decides against suicide, then falls 30 feet into a dry streambed, the reader settles in for what looks to be a comedy. But just as quickly, there are intimations of another sort of book—one which interleaves brief, mysterious cris de coeur from Benji’s father, Henry Fisher, a prominent novelist now descending into Alzheimer's disease. Henry’s interior monologues refer to a long-lost character named Jane whose role in the Fishers’ past will remain unclear for quite a while. Meanwhile, the rest of the family assembles to figure out who will take care of Benji. Aside from Benji’s 658 Facebook friends (“He was after all, the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question ('80s edition)”), the candidates are mother Evelyn, long-suffering older sister Claudia, and a lovely 25-year-old actress named Cat McCarthy.Cat played Ophelia in the ill-fated production of Hamlet, and while it’s unsurprising that Benji was lusting after her, it’s a bit of a head-scratcher that she’s fallen for him. “She’d rented all four seasons of Prodigy while he was in the hospital, all five of his films, even A Hamster for Hannah, and discussed them without mockery, seriously, as a body of (her word) work that might one day have him thanking Uta Hagen from the dais.” Cat shows up at the hospital with a gift, a copy of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which becomes a major plot element when yet another mystery character arrives on the scene. Max Davis is an actual prodigy, a 22-year-old cellist with a secret connection to the family, now in the process of writing an opera based on To the Lighthouse. But tragedy is on the way for all of them.
Like its protagonist, this novel aspires to more than it achieves.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5039-5200-3
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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