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
Closely observed and elegantly written: an overstuffed story that embraces decades and a large cast of characters without...
An assured debut novel that sets the life of one man against the tumultuous backdrop of Palestine in the waning years of British occupation.
Midhat Kamal has been thoroughly steeped in French culture—writes Hammad, he “knew the names of his internal organs as ‘le poumon’ and ‘le coeur’ and ‘le cerveau’ and ‘l’encéphale’ ”—but is never at home in his dreamed-of France, where he has come from his home in Nablus to study medicine. His French isn’t quite perfect, not at first, which occasions an odd thought: “What if, since by the same token one could not afford ambiguity, everything also became more direct?” Things happen directly enough that he’s soon enfolded in various dramas acted out by the good people of Montpellier. Midhat is a philosophically inclined soul who, as his yearned-for Jeannette remarks, is wont “to rely on what other people have said” in the countless books he’s read. Like Zhivago, he is aware of events but somehow apart from them. When he returns to Nablus at a time when European Jews are heeding Herzl’s call and moving to Palestine, he finds the city divided not just by the alignments of social class, but also by a new politics: “We must resist all of the Jews,” insists a neighbor of Midhat’s, advocating a militant solution that others think should be directed at the British colonizers. Hammad sometimes drifts into the didactic in outlining an exceedingly complex history, but she does so with a poet’s eye for detail, writing, for instance, of Nablus’ upper-class women, who “grow fat among cushions and divert their vigour into childbirth and playing music, and siphon what remained into promulgating rumors about their rivals." The years pass, and Midhat weathers change, illness, madness, and a declining command of French, seeking and finding love and family: At the end, he announces, “When I look at my life…I see a whole list of mistakes. Lovely, beautiful mistakes. I wouldn’t change them.”
Closely observed and elegantly written: an overstuffed story that embraces decades and a large cast of characters without longueurs.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2943-7
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
Though it has a lot of heart, this novel bites off more than it can chew.
A spirited woman takes on piloting planes, helping soldiers, and breaking the glass ceiling in Salazar’s debut.
Audrey Coltrane has been obsessed with flying since she was a little girl. When an opportunity to train new Army recruits to fly begins in Hawaii, she takes the job. Unfortunately, this means Audrey is up in the air on Dec. 7, 1941, and finds herself involved in the attack on Pearl Harbor and its aftermath. Determined to continue flying and helping with the war effort, she becomes part of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, a group of women given the job of ferrying planes to various military bases. As Audrey makes her way through the worst of the war, she makes and loses friends, deals with her feelings for a faraway soldier, and learns what it is she actually wants out of life. Pulling from the real histories of WASP women, the book has an air of authenticity when Salazar describes the everyday ordeals of talented and hardworking women just trying to do their jobs in a harsh environment. The novel is incredibly earnest, and there are big ideas on every page, to the point that it detracts from the power of the book. The plot races along without any time to breathe, so characters appear and are killed without giving the reader any chance to get to know them or mourn them. Instead of focusing on one experience, the author attempts at least a reference to most major World War II events. Despite a section set in Hawaii, there are no major characters of color and only a brief mention of internment camps. There’s so much stuffed into the book that it ends up feeling like very little.
Though it has a lot of heart, this novel bites off more than it can chew.Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7783-6922-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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