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SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE

By Gardiner (In the Heart of the Whole World, 1988, etc.), a complex, often startling tale about the nature of loyalty (to family, to the state, to an ideal) and on medicine’s struggle to master disease. In France, at the end of WWI, Major William Lloyd, a bright, energetic, progressive doctor, struggles to run a hospital for Allied wounded. The supply officer, however, is blithely corrupt, siphoning off money and the best food for himself and his cronies. Lloyd finds an unlikely ally in a taciturn French nurse, Jeanne, who has remarkable skill at tending men and a shrewd eye for diagnosing the many ills set in motion by wounds or disease. Gradually, Lloyd discovers that she is, in fact, an extraordinarily gifted, and obsessed, medical researcher who has worked for Louis Pasteur and has created serums that may actually control the infections raging among the wounded. Lloyd finds himself falling in love with Jeanne, and matters grow more complex when his eldest son, William, is drafted. An opponent of the war, son William runs afoul of authority when he’s shipped off to Europe. Arrested for his outspoken pacifism, he falls ill in a French prison and ends up in his father’s hospital, close to death. One of Jeanne’s serums might save him, but can Lloyd bring himself to experiment on his son? And, the war over, can he part from Jeanne? Gardiner’s character portraits are penetrating, as is his dissection of William’s agony over his divided loyalties. But Jeanne remains an unlikely figure, part mystic, part driven scientist. And William’s passion is baffling. Indeed, many of the characters are lucid in their thoughts but enigmatic in their actions, and the ending, unfortunately, seems both abrupt and too relentlessly downbeat, as if the author were trying too hard to assign fortunes and fates. Yet the portrait of wartime France is convincing, and Gardiner’s meditations on the obligations of medicine and on the nature of familial love remain original and moving.

Pub Date: Sept. 17, 1999

ISBN: 0-375-40740-5

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

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