Readers who traveled the continent with Lewis and Clark in Brian Hall’s masterly I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company...
A daft Vermonter and his loyal nephew precede Lewis and Clark—in an erudite and absorbing tweak of the Great Exploration.
Skirting the dangerous whirlpools of whimsy and preciousness, novelist (The Fall of the Year, 1999) and memoirist (North Country, 1997) Mosher, himself a Vermonter, spins a light-as-air western concoction. Narrator Ticonderoga (Ti) Kinneson, only son of a small-town newspaper editor, has grown up under the tutelage of his father’s energetically eccentric brother Private True Teague Kinneson. Uncle True—whose claim to have accompanied Ethan Allen at his victory would have made him a soldier at age seven—drives his younger brother to distraction, but he is his nephew’s hero and friend. True blames his dottiness on a fall taken at the celebration of the Vermont victory at Ticonderoga, a whack to the skull requiring the constant protection of a copper basin, itself protected by a knit, belled cap. Oh, and he wears a codpiece. It would be a lazy student, then, who did not catch the references to Cervantes as Uncle True escapes New England to compete in a race to the Pacific against President Jefferson’s official party, references to whom Mosher makes happily and unpretentiously (L. Frank Baum pops up too). The utterly loyal Ti, mounted on a fine stallion, a gift, like True’s white mule, from President Jefferson, dutifully follows the possibly mad man to Monticello and the world beyond, a world that includes Daniel Boone’s nymphomaniacal daughter, an endless succession of interesting Indian tribes, big skies, and near-daily encounters with death and disaster, with escapes almost always due to True’s boundless ingenuity, which was unaffected by the disastrous blow to the head all those years ago. In the midst of the madness and maelstroms, Ti learns to paint well enough to invent a genre that incorporates Indian artistic conventions. The Kinnesons are in constant contact with but always ahead of Lewis and Clark, and they do, indeed, make it to the Pacific.
Readers who traveled the continent with Lewis and Clark in Brian Hall’s masterly I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company will see the same landmarks and run into the same people, but they’ll have a much, much easier trip—and more fun.Pub Date: June 5, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-19721-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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