An irreverent novel—at turns both comic and febrile—that connects us to Dickinson’s longings and eccentricities.
Charyn (Johnny One-Eye, 2008, plus more than 40 other books) takes on Emily Dickinson’s private life—what was she doing all those years she was shut up in Amherst?
Well, for one thing, according to Charyn, throughout her life she was falling in love with a number of men who crossed her path. The recurring character who remains one of the great loves of Emily’s life is Tom the Handyman, part-time laborer and full-time rogue. We first meet him at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary Emily attended in the 1840s. (Emily first becomes intrigued by an arrow-and-heart tattoo on Tom’s arm.) Throughout Emily’s life he resurfaces under various guises, and Emily never loses her infatuation, though at times she admits she might be more in love with the fantasy rather than with the reality of Tom. At the seminary Emily also meets Zilpah Marsh, who eventually becomes Tom’s lover (and his partner in crime) and winds up in an insane asylum in Northampton. Emily also becomes drawn into a force field created by the charismatic presence of Sue, married to Emily’s brother Austin. While her sentiments are perhaps not quite strong enough to be designated “love,” Emily definitely feels a strong attraction to Sue and finds Sue’s detachment and assertiveness irresistible. Late in her life, Emily becomes enamored with the widower Judge Otis Phillips Lord (whom she calls “Salem”), and he finds their gravitational pull both strong and mutual. He awakens Emily’s latent sexuality (“I could feel that sweet wolf gnaw its way back into my loins. I didn’t waver. I slowly slid onto my Salem’s lap, wanting him to dandle me again. I ought to have some privileges at fifty-one”). Finally, appearing sporadically but looming importantly in Emily’s life is her father, “Major” Edward Dickinson—patriarch, Congressman and Alpha male.
An irreverent novel—at turns both comic and febrile—that connects us to Dickinson’s longings and eccentricities.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-393-06856-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
A flawed novel which could, with the right cast to lend emotional depth, make very good TV.
A Jewish nuclear physicist is accused of spying while working on the nuclear bomb in Los Alamos.
During the waning months of World War II, the Americans and Germans are in a race to develop nuclear weapons; whoever wins, wins the world. Many refugee European scientists are working for the U.S. nuclear effort, headed by American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. Among these refugees is Dr. Hannah Weiss, loosely based on Dr. Lise Meitner, the unsung physicist who discovered nuclear fission. Maj. Jack Delaney has come to Los Alamos to interrogate Hannah, suspected of being a Nazi mole. His suspicions are founded on a telegram she may have attempted to send overseas and a packet of postcards gleaned from a search of her room. Flashbacks to 1938 Berlin are interspersed throughout. Hannah, a brilliant scientist, is relegated to a basement lab of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and treated as a “Jewish slave.” Her work on atom splitting is so valuable to the Reich, however, that what remains of her family—her Uncle Joshua and niece Sabine—have so far escaped the worst impacts of Nazi persecution. Her colleague Stefan, whose playboy charm Hannah tries to resist, takes credit for her work. But Stefan will eventually help Sabine, and then Hannah, escape Germany, and love overcomes her distrust. But should it? Screenwriter and TV director Eliasberg’s first novel effectively evokes the atmosphere; descriptions of setting are never merely ornamental. However, her characters lack interiority. Jack never quite transcends the stereotype of the hard-boiled detective with inner wounds to match his external ones: A bullet he took during the liberation of Paris is still lodged near his spine. Hannah is the beautiful ice queen who conceals a molten core of passion. Far from delivering the intended frisson of growing attraction, Jack and Hannah’s verbal sparring is too often verbose and didactic. The characters are so one-dimensional that readers won’t particularly care which side they’re on.
A flawed novel which could, with the right cast to lend emotional depth, make very good TV.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-53744-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Back Bay/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Real events like the Vietnam draft and Stonewall uprising enter the characters' family history as well as a stunning plot...
The Owens sisters are back—not in their previous guise as elderly aunties casting spells in Hoffman’s occult romance Practical Magic (1995), but as fledgling witches in the New York City captured in Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids.
In that magical, mystical milieu, Franny and Bridget are joined by a new character: their foxy younger brother, Vincent, whose “unearthly” charm sends grown women in search of love potions. Heading into the summer of 1960, the three Owens siblings are ever more conscious of their family's quirkiness—and not just the incidents of levitation and gift for reading each other's thoughts while traipsing home to their parents' funky Manhattan town house. The instant Franny turns 17, they are all shipped off to spend the summer with their mother's aunt in Massachusetts. Isabelle Owens might enlist them for esoteric projects like making black soap or picking herbs to cure a neighbor's jealousy, but she at least offers respite from their fretful mother's strict rules against going shoeless, bringing home stray birds, wandering into Greenwich Village, or falling in love. In short order, the siblings meet a know-it-all Boston cousin, April, who brings them up to speed on the curse set in motion by their Salem-witch ancestor, Maria Owens. It spells certain death for males who attempt to woo an Owens woman. Naturally this knowledge does not deter the current generation from circumventing the rule—Bridget most passionately, Franny most rationally, and Vincent most recklessly (believing his gender may protect him). In time, the sisters ignore their mother's plea and move to Greenwich Village, setting up an apothecary, while their rock-star brother, who glimpsed his future in Isabelle’s nifty three-way mirror, breaks hearts like there's no tomorrow. No one's more confident or entertaining than Hoffman at putting across characters willing to tempt fate for true love.
Real events like the Vietnam draft and Stonewall uprising enter the characters' family history as well as a stunning plot twist—delivering everything fans of a much-loved book could hope for in a prequel.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3747-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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