An overflowing tale of love and war, with plot turns as swift as they are melodramatic.
In this novel of war and remembrance, a soldier-turned-attorney adds a new bullet point to his resume—stolen art investigator.
Elmer Davis is a renowned criminal defense lawyer in Washington, D.C., but none of his high-profile colleagues know about his experiences in World War II. Now 63 and disenchanted with the legal profession, he’s ready to tell all to his feisty girlfriend, Cecelia. So begins a flashback that occupies the first pages of the book. The year is 1943, and according to Davis, he’s “small, insignificant looking, a real klutz athletically, and a great disappointment to my parents.” He also has low self-esteem, but he decides to enlist in the Marines for the usual heroic reasons. “We are starting to win this war and it would be kind of exciting to kick the Germans out of Paris,” he tells Suzanne Robards, his first love, with whom he endures somewhat predictable heartbreak. Military service earns Davis a sense of identity and the nickname “Frog” for his impressive basso when calling out dirty ditties during field exercises. Wounded by shrapnel and captured by German forces—a scenario reminiscent of Hogan’s Heroes—Davis later finds some solace in the arms of an energetic Frau. “Elmer was like a kid who had just discovered ice cream,” the author says of his first sexual experience on a hospital cot, “he just couldn’t get enough.” After surviving the Russian invasion and celebrating the nuking of Hiroshima, Davis returns home, excels in college and puts his commanding voice to work in the courtroom. Back in the present, he has another surprise for Cecelia: He’s starting a new business recovering artwork stolen by the Nazis. “If I can get that first client,” he says, “I think the business will take off.” Then, somewhat unbelievably, he befriends his former Nazi captor and reignites sparks with his old flame. Author Loos paints on a broad canvas with impressive scope. Part coming-of-age novel, part legal thriller and part World War II story, the book is sprawling and ambitious if a bit overstuffed. Despite the clear prose, the dialogue can be comically formal: “ ‘I shall miss you,’ he said sadly. ‘You have been such a bright spot in my life.’ ” Still, those ready to go along for the ride are in for an exciting tale with plenty of ups and downs.
An overflowing tale of love and war, with plot turns as swift as they are melodramatic.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-1484041567
Page Count: 316
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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