A must for Jamesians, with a storyline sturdy enough to draw in the unconverted as well.
Hot on the heels of Colm Tóibín’s The Master (p. 297), another novel about Henry James’s later years.
Though Lodge (Thinks…, 2001, etc.) is best known for his satirical fiction, his tone here is generally serious, opening with James’s deathbed scene in 1915. Then a shift to the early 1880s finds the writer walking in London with his close friend, Punch illustrator George Du Maurier, while James is at his midcareer peak. Daisy Miller, Washington Square, and Portrait of a Lady have made him “the coming man of the literary novel. . . [while] his elegant, cosmopolitan essays appeared in the most prestigious reviews. Hostesses competed for his presence.” But as the narrative moves through the late ’80s and ’90s, sticking close to the facts but with convincing forays into the writer’s thoughts, we see more elaborate novels like The Princess Casamassina slightly diminishing James’ reputation, while an ill-advised five-year excursion into playwriting climaxes with the disastrous 1895 premiere of Guy Domville. James struggles not to feel jealous of Du Maurier’s huge success with the novel Trilby, but that’s hard for a man who has consciously dedicated his entire life to his art. The 1894 suicide of James’s other close friend, American popular novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, who may have been in love with him, leads James to fear that his obsession with the perfectly crafted sentence has dried up his heart. On the contrary, Lodge’s warmly sympathetic portrait quietly asserts, James’s grappling with envy and despair in this very human manner led to his final masterpieces, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. Though the pace here is almost as stately as in those late novels, the effect is powerfully emotional as the book closes with the writer’s last moments and an authorial interpolation by Lodge expressing his love for James the artist—and the man.
A must for Jamesians, with a storyline sturdy enough to draw in the unconverted as well.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03349-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
IN THE NEWS
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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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