Despite fevered descriptions and various half-developed characters meandering down plot paths leading nowhere, the...
A catfish stew of a novel from Agee (The Weight of Dreams, 1999, etc.), covering three generations of a Missouri farming family that can’t shake its river pirate roots.
In 1930, Hedie Rails marries charming spendthrift Clement Ducharme and moves to his farm at Jacques’ Landing. Desperate for money to keep the farm afloat, Clement disappears frequently on probably criminal business. Left behind, pregnant and lonely, Hedie finds a journal—a too obviously artificial literary device—that tells the Ducharme family history. In 1811, river pirate Jacques Ducharme saves Annie Lark’s life after an earthquake leaves her crippled. They marry but their early passion withers when Jacques’ vicious dogs kill their child in a horrifying scene. Annie dies in a flood. Jacques’ main cohort and confidante becomes Omah, the daughter of freed slaves. After the Civil War, Jacques murders his second wife, Laura, who has proved herself both unfaithful and greedy. Omah helps him raise Laura’s daughter, Little Maddie, the novel’s one lovable character. When Jacques finally dies, his will requires that Little Maddie remain celibate if she wants to keep the farm. Instead, after a 13-year love affair, she uses a horse to bribe her way into getting both farm and marriage, then dies two years later. Her son is Clement. He squanders Hedie’s love with his unquenchable lust for money, and possibly other women. After Hedie miscarries their first child, she befriends the black couple down the road whose daughter, Omah’s granddaughter, India, becomes Clement’s apparent lover. Then Hedie, again pregnant, finds Clement shot in the front seat of his car with India dead in the back. She follows his dying orders to bury him in quicksand so she can keep Jacques’ Landing and raise the next Ducharme generation.
Despite fevered descriptions and various half-developed characters meandering down plot paths leading nowhere, the violence-spiked romance upon violence-spiked romance becomes addictive.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6596-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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