Though well-written, this novel lays the misery on thick.
In Yates’ debut novel, a woman growing up in a dysfunctional family and her Holocaust-survivor grandfather are shaped by their experiences of surviving pain through moments of grace.
Julianne “Jules” Finn grows up in the 1960s and ’70s in the small Cape Cod town of Withensea with her two brothers and a set of terrible parents. Her Irish-Catholic father, Howard, drinks, gambles, and hits both wife and children. Her Jewish mother, Wendy, practices self-indulgence in all its most flamboyant hippie manifestations—especially after she and Howard divorce, and the family house devolves into a nonstop drugs, sex and drinking party. Jules and her brothers “became less like children and more like neglected pets,” with Jules (as the only girl) left to do the family’s grocery shopping, cooking, laundry and cleaning, while also looking after her younger brother, Moses. When the unsupervised boy dies accidentally, Jules blames herself. In this, she has something in common with her grandfather Samuel, who carries a heavy load of guilt: He survived the Holocaust but failed to protect his grandchildren. Alternating sections from Jules’ and Samuel’s points of view follow their emotional journeys. Yates shows much skill in description, characterization and dialogue, and she’s insightful about the mental state of abused children, as when Jules learns to compartmentalize: “I began to see my life in parts. When something bad, or weird, or crazy happened, like my father having a gun and threatening my mother, I’d say to myself: This is the part where my father points a gun at my mother’s head.” Jules’ and Samuel’s voices are distinct; similarly, Yates vividly evokes time and place, whether it’s Samuel’s childhood among the apple and cherry orchards in the Ukraine, the bleakness of a Cape Cod tourist town in winter or Wendy’s psychedelic decorating style. That said, the novel loses some impact because its elements are overfamiliar from the glut of novels and memoirs relating similar stories.
Though well-written, this novel lays the misery on thick.Pub Date: April 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-1938314643
Page Count: 314
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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