Lyrical first novel, enraptured by nature and language, traces the fortunes of three unusual women and the men who love them from the summer of 1913 to the hurricane of 1938.
Elizabeth Gonne Low, 65 when the story begins, is a wealthy outsider in the coastal town of Westport, Massachusetts, though she lives there year-round. So does Maggie, a 16-year-old immigrant from Latin America who tends to Elizabeth, beds down with a local merchant, and seems to know everything about animals and plants. Elizabeth’s granddaughter Eve comes for the summers, beginning in 1917 when the seven-year-old arrives with her father, grief-stricken after his wife’s mysterious death. Eve found her mother’s body, and she’s retreated into a hazy disconnect that entices Jake Wilkes, a local boy who “grows displaced from his own life” through reading the books in Elizabeth’s library. Jake’s older brother, Wes, solidly rooted in the town’s old ways, becomes a rum-runner and engages in a fierce, disastrous affair with Maggie. Eve feels Jake’s attraction (“somehow he had unwrapped her, and now she could not find her way back to being closed”), but she settles for Patrick Gerow, an architect designing fancy new houses for the summer people. Elizabeth’s thoughts turn increasingly toward death, Maggie nurses the shattered Wes, and Eve yearns for Jake as the narrative meanders toward the famous hurricane that devastated New England on September 21, 1938. The storm blows some energy into Tripp’s languid narrative, though even in this apocalyptic climax the prose tends to be overwrought, as are the plot developments. Tripp writes lovely sentences, but she’s so enamored by the sound of her authorial voice that the characters remain artful constructs without convincing lives of their own.
Lots of nicely rendered, physically specific details about farming, fishing, and hunting in the first third of the 20th century, but too many of the central insights are as solemn and obvious as the moon imagery that gives the book its title.Pub Date: July 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50844-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
While a few weeks ago it seemed as if Praeger would have a two month lead over Dutton in their presentation of this Soviet best seller, both the "authorized" edition (Dutton's) and the "unauthorized" (Praeger's) will appear almost simultaneously. There has been considerable advance attention on what appears to be as much of a publishing cause celebre here as the original appearance of the book in Russia. Without entering into the scrimmage, or dismissing it as a plague on both your houses, we will limit ourselves to a few facts. Royalties from the "unauthorized" edition will go to the International Rescue Committee; Dutton with their contracted edition is adhering to copyright conventions. The Praeger edition has two translators and one of them is the translator of Doctor Zhivago Dutton's translator, Ralph Parker, has been stigmatized by Praeger as "an apologist for the Soviet regime". To the untutored eye, the Dutton translation seems a little more literary, the Praeger perhaps closer to the rather primitive style of the original. The book itself is an account of one day in the three thousand six hundred and fifty three days of the sentence to be served by a carpenter, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. (Solzhenitsyn was a political prisoner.) From the unrelenting cold without, to the conditions within, from the bathhouse to the latrine to the cells where survival for more than two weeks is impossible, this records the hopeless facts of existence as faced by thousands who went on "living like this, with your eyes on the ground". The Dutton edition has an excellent introduction providing an orientation on the political background to its appearance in Russia by Marvin Kalb. All involved in its publication (translators, introducers, etc.) claim for it great "artistic" values which we cannot share, although there is no question of its importance as a political and human document and as significant and tangible evidence of the de-Stalinization program.
Pub Date: June 15, 1963
ISBN: 0451228146
Page Count: 181
Publisher: Praeger
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1963
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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Hannah’s sequel to Firefly Lane (2008) demonstrates that those who ignore family history are often condemned to repeat it.
When we last left Kate and Tully, the best friends portrayed in Firefly Lane, the friendship was on rocky ground. Now Kate has died of cancer, and Tully, whose once-stellar TV talk show career is in free fall, is wracked with guilt over her failure to be there for Kate until her very last days. Kate’s death has cemented the distrust between her husband, Johnny, and daughter Marah, who expresses her grief by cutting herself and dropping out of college to hang out with goth poet Paxton. Told mostly in flashbacks by Tully, Johnny, Marah and Tully’s long-estranged mother, Dorothy, aka Cloud, the story piles up disasters like the derailment of a high-speed train. Increasingly addicted to prescription sedatives and alcohol, Tully crashes her car and now hovers near death, attended by Kate’s spirit, as the other characters gather to see what their shortsightedness has wrought. We learn that Tully had tried to parent Marah after her father no longer could. Her hard-drinking decline was triggered by Johnny’s anger at her for keeping Marah and Paxton’s liaison secret. Johnny realizes that he only exacerbated Marah’s depression by uprooting the family from their Seattle home. Unexpectedly, Cloud, who rebuffed Tully’s every attempt to reconcile, also appears at her daughter’s bedside. Sixty-nine years old and finally sober, Cloud details for the first time the abusive childhood, complete with commitments to mental hospitals and electroshock treatments, that led to her life as a junkie lowlife and punching bag for trailer-trash men. Although powerful, Cloud’s largely peripheral story deflects focus away from the main conflict, as if Hannah was loath to tackle the intractable thicket in which she mired her main characters.
Unrelenting gloom relieved only occasionally by wrenching trauma; somehow, though, Hannah’s storytelling chops keep the pages turning even as readers begin to resent being drawn into this masochistic morass.Pub Date: April 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-57721-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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