A mixed bag, with effective plotting hampered by clunky writing.
Sprawling but undercooked saga of Manhattan and environs.
Perhaps the qualifying subtitle of Rutherfurd’s latest cat-squasher (Rebels of Ireland, 2006, etc.) is meant to distinguish it from, say, the sidecar volume to Ric Burns’ documentary or any number of histories. Sadly, in the comparison, this novel suffers. Written in formulas and clichés, it stretches to the horizon with stock characters, as with this apparition of good Peter Stuyvesant: “The governor’s face was set hard as flint. Standing tall and erect on his peg leg, he had never looked more indomitable. You had to admire the man.” Given such a description, one wonders why the Dutch ever lost Nieuw Amsterdam in the first place. Prose like that would do Dan Brown proud, but it gets worse. Much better is Rutherfurd’s structuring of the tale to track the progress of one generation to the next, showing familial connections and revisiting themes that cross the centuries, many of them touching on the beguiling qualities of the Big Apple: “Before he’d even gone to Columbia, Charlie had shown a precocious interest in the nightlife of the great city…More than once he’d come home drunk.” The narrative is as studded with characters as Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace’s magisterial history Gotham (1998); within a couple of pages, Woodrow Wilson, Nicholas Murray Butler, Henry Frick, Charles Scribner and the Kaiser make appearances. In the main, though, Rutherfurd’s principals are blue-blooded and noble, if conflicted and not always ethical—which seems quite in keeping with the historical realities.
A mixed bag, with effective plotting hampered by clunky writing.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52138-3
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
None
"If you can't deal with the morning, get out of the game." Maria Wyeth can't deal with the mornings or the long, disintegrating nights—she's been married to and divorced by Carter; she has a hopelessly damaged four-year-old and the insistent, regretful memory of an abortion; she's made a film or two; and she drifts from Hollywood to New York to Las Vegas and from bars to motels.In fact she's the kind of girl whom one of her looser contacts will call up and say "Did I catch you in the middle of an overdose" and this is the kind of scene which is "beaucoup fantastic." You may remember Run River (1963) which was about another scuffed spirit like Maria whose dissolution was as complete. But even though you have every reason to suspect that this is an ephemeral form of survival kitsch under its sophisticated maquillage, you won't be impervious.
None NonePub Date: July 13, 1970
ISBN: 0374529949
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1970
PERSPECTIVES
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PERSPECTIVES
A curious fusion of the predictable and the unconventional which, given the appetite for Paris, love, and wartime tragedy,...
While a timid French music teacher grieves the death of her partner, outside, on the streets of Paris, his ghost lingers, lending historical context and soulful musings to a story of unresolved anguish and late love.
Chaudhry’s elegant debut rests on an unusual and risky premise: It is narrated in part by a soul in limbo. Julien Dalsace has died before the story opens, and his old-fashioned voice sets the scene: “The scent of lilacs on the breeze stirs dormant phantoms to life, but music is sorcery more potent.” We are in Paris in the year of the bicentennial, 1989, observing, like Julien, the struggles of his surviving partner, Sylvie, to cope with her loss. Julien, although spectral, is the novel’s lynchpin. The romance between him—an older, upper-class, married Jewish psychologist—and the quiveringly sensitive piano teacher is the beating heart of the story. But there’s another thread, taking the reader back to 1942, when the Jews of Paris were rounded up and deported, including Julien’s sister, Clara, and her twin daughters. Julien never forgave himself for his absence in London during World War II and his failure to save Clara, but a secret folder that emerges after his death offers Sylvie the opportunity to conclude his quest to discover the fate of Clara’s girls. Julien’s curious perspective—on history, on other ghosts, on the beauty but complexity of France generally and the Île Saint-Louis, his corner of Paris, in particular—is the novel’s most original aspect. Elsewhere, while Chaudhry brings a kind of reverent seriousness to events both past and present, her approach is more familiar. Characters are often simple, like the kindly Jewish baker, the protective (but kindly) concierge, the sympathetic American lodgers, and even Sylvie’s anthropomorphized terrier, Coco. And resolutions, even sad ones, arrive with coincidence and ease.
A curious fusion of the predictable and the unconventional which, given the appetite for Paris, love, and wartime tragedy, might well touch a popular nerve.Pub Date: June 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54460-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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