A witty, formally thrilling family saga that feels about 100 pages too long.
A generation-spanning debut novel of unintended pregnancies and imperfect chosen families, winner of the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize, by a black Canadian writer.
In the late 1970s, two people meet in a Toronto hospital, where their dying mothers share the same room. That seems to be as far as their similarities extend: Edgar Gross is a wealthy, early-middle-aged white German man who works for his family’s company, while Felicia Shaw is a 19-year-old black high school student originally from a “small unrecognized island.” Felicia’s mother dies and Edgar’s is eventually discharged, but the two strike up a romance that is by turns affectionately teasing and rancorous. But soon Felicia finds out Edgar is married and then that she’s pregnant; Edgar tries to force her to have an abortion, and Felicia moves out. A decade and a half later, Felicia and her 15-year-old son, Army, live in part of a house shared by their landlord, Oliver, and his two children. In alternating sections, Williams (Personals, 2012, etc.) roves among the perspectives of the people living at 55 Newcourt— Felicia, drawn in yet again by Edgar, who’s facing allegations of sexual harassment at his company; Army, who lusts after Oliver’s 16-year-old daughter, Heather, and concocts various get-rich-quick schemes that rely mostly on his peers’ money; Oliver, who can’t stop thinking about his recent, acrimonious divorce; and Heather, who flirts with Army and a skinny shelf stocker at the local mall. But when Heather is raped and becomes pregnant, the residents of 55 Newcourt band together to take care of her. The novel contains a sly but sharp critique of power, in which women are forced to shoulder the failings, large and small, of white men—“[Edgar] stood in the doorway of the living room, calling for Felicia, whining the last syllable, waiting, as if he had forgotten how to take off his coat”—whose internal monologues are self-absorbed and un-self-consciously racist: “Her people killed each other as punctuation,” Edgar thinks of Felicia. But what pulls the reader along are Williams’ playful, brilliant formal innovations: song lyrics annotated from Heather’s point of view, a bravura section organized in the form of a numbered list that cycles through each character’s stream-of-consciousness and humanizes everyone involved. The last section, by contrast, drags as it attempts to tie together the novel’s themes into a neat yet unsatisfying bow.
A witty, formally thrilling family saga that feels about 100 pages too long.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-60945-575-0
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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