The girl from Paris is Ellen Paget, who starts out in 1860 as the girl from Brussels: though English-born, 21-year-old Ellen has spent the past few years as a student and then a teacher at the exclusive Pensionnat girls' school. Now, however, the school's directress has become disenchanted with lovely semi-aristocrat Ellen (who's winning the excessive devotion of the school's resident philosopher/professor). So Ellen's godmother whisks her off to Paris—where she's to become governess in the home of the young Comte de la Ferte. But the Comte's is a strange menage, to put it mildly: the Comtesse ignores her husband, doting instead on her live-in Sapphic companion, earthy novelist Germaine de Rhetoree; the Comtesse shines in her literary salon (cameos by Flaubert et al.), while her husband entertains the mindless, chichi crowd in his gaming rooms; their little daughter is hyperactive and understandably unstable. And the household tensions—the Comte is pressuring his wife about producing a son—will lead to a tragic suicide/murder, with poor Ellen somewhat tainted by the scandal. At that point, then, the scene switches entirely over to Britain—as Ellen goes home to her own family complications at the Paget manse ("the Hermitage") in England. Old, bitter father Luke, whose second wife has recently been killed in an accident, is in danger of being taken over by a fortune-hunting housekeeper. Ellen's younger brother Gerard, a gifted musician who prefers the company of shepherds, is being pushed into law. Little half-sister Vicky is being neglected. Stepbrother Benedict is waspishly argumentative. And, finally, when Luke does indeed seem to be bequeathing his fortune to the shady housekeeper, Ellen's sisters abduct the old man—so Ellen, with help from Benedict (love blooms), must rescue her mad, foul father . . . for the sake of her dead, beloved mother. Aiken's plotting this time around is awfully choppy: the France/England halves of the book hardly connect; the Gerard subplot (which ends violently) is drastically underdeveloped; and the delicious light touch of The Smile of the Stranger is nearly nonexistent here. Nonetheless, her no-nonsense tone and offbeat panache move the fragmented episodes along quite spiffily—and the many Aiken fans will find this a lively smorgasbord of un-frilly period entanglements, with some quasi-feminist resonances.
Pub Date: June 1, 1982
ISBN: 0385179790
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1982
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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