A life in pictures, mostly out of focus.
A film star of Hollywood’s golden age goes mild, in Straub’s curiously bloodless debut.
Elsa Emerson, whose father owns and manages a Wisconsin summer stock playhouse, wasn’t always destined for stardom. Her older sister, Hildy, is the one with the glamour, presence and grace. But when Hildy hangs herself after being jilted by an actor, Elsa’s discovery of her sister’s body forever alters her worldview. Just how, is the novel’s task to reveal, and unfortunately it fails in that purpose. Elsa seems to drift into the various phases of her life. Having escaped Wisconsin by marrying fellow Hollywood-bound thespian Gordon, she gives birth to two daughters in quick succession and is consigned to housewifery while her husband achieves a modicum of success under contract to Gardner Brothers Studio. When Elsa meets Gardner mogul Irving Green, he sees her diva potential, renames her Laura Lamont and changes her Nordic blond looks to the persona of a sultry brunette. Gordon is quickly dispensed with, and she marries Irving, who provides security and an opulent house in Beverly Hills. By the time her son, Irving Junior, is born, Laura’s career again takes a back seat, this time to a more luxurious domesticity—now even her husband is touting her for matronly roles. Although Laura wins an Oscar early on, there is scant other evidence of her celebrity status since we see mostly her home life. Already a passive character, she becomes more so after Irving’s death. (He had a weak heart and was never robust.) She resorts to barbiturates to get her through her not-so-busy day. The tragedy of Irving’s death compounds the psychic wounds opened by Hildy’s suicide and more recently, her beloved father’s passing. Although Straub’s languid language convincingly conveys Laura/Elsa’s inability to cope, the reader at times wishes this screen star would go less gently into the good night of the aging female in Hollywood.
A life in pictures, mostly out of focus.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59448-845-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
A richly inventive work of literature with a colorful cast of characters.
One of Germany's most celebrated young novelists updates and transforms the 16th-century classic Till Eulenspiegel.
The story is now set during the Thirty Years' War, 300 years after the time of the original story. And the boy protagonist's name is now spelled Tyll Ulenspiegel. After his Lutheran father, Claus, a miller, is hanged by the fanatical Jesuit inquisitor Oswald Tesimond for possessing books on black magic, Tyll escapes his village with his sister, Nele. A precocious kid with an obsession for tightrope walking, he becomes a prankish entertainer and provocateur who can transfix crowds with his act and create chaos. Told through multiple points of view, the novel mixes such historical figures as Elizabeth, exiled Winter Queen of Bohemia, with folkloric characters including a talking donkey named Origenes. Parts of the book could hardly be more relevant to the present, including this circular exchange on torture: "Without torture no one would ever confess anything!" "Whereas under torture everyone confesses." In exploring the borders between history and myth, Kehlmann (You Should Have Left, 2017, etc.) sometimes risks putting off readers with his intellectual gamesmanship. More often, he creates odd, darkly entertaining scenes. The miller is at the center of several of them. He is executed for possessing a book of spells that he can't read because it's in Latin. And no one has ever faced the gallows as sated as Claus, who pushes an all-you-can-eat last-meal policy to the max.
A richly inventive work of literature with a colorful cast of characters.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4746-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Tom Jones in the Wild West. More to come.
The master of amiable, easygoing westerns (Boone’s Luck, 2000, etc.) launches part one of the four-book adventures of a rich, noble, pleasantly debauched English family in the Louisiana Territory.
“Sin Killer” is one of the handles by which lanky, handsome, freelance explorer Jim Snow is known. Master of every skill known in 1830s Indian country, Snow is still uncertain how to deal with the stark-nekkid and headstrong daughter of an English lord he encounters when he himself is also stark-nekkid. Each had been bathing in a reach of the Missouri River prior to the cute-meet—he because that’s where he bathes, she, Lady Tasmin Berrybender, because she’d gotten muddy after drifting away from the steamboat hired by her ridiculous, philandering, filthy-rich father, Lord Berrybender. Tasmin is ripe for an amorous adventure and keen to get away from the rest of the Berrybenders. Understandably. Life on the steamboat with them would try anyone’s nerves. Her mum, Lady Berrybender, is a loud lush, and the Lord is a sort of Squire Western on steroids. He’s brought with him on his New World shooting-party an artist, a Polish gamekeeper, French governess, German tutoress, myriad servants, several Indians being returned home after a visit to the White Man’s president, and his current mistress, an ambitious cellist. Along also several of Tasmin’s quarrelsome younger siblings, so numerous that their names drift into numbers. Tasmin would love to trade all this chaos for high adventure with good-looking Mr. Snow in the America she has romanticized, but first she and Snow need to get past his lack of interest in her ceaseless questions and her indignation over his two wives back in Ute territory. When all wind up frozen in for the winter on the upper Missouri, Lord B. will have lost numerous digits, and several of the party will fall victim to an exceedingly grumpy Russo-Indian woman with spurious ties to the spirit world.
Tom Jones in the Wild West. More to come.Pub Date: May 13, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-3302-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
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