Old-fashioned multigenerational saga of buried treasure, hidden sin, and the redemptive power of religion and family, set in balmy Savannah. Originally issued last year by a small press, podiatrist Harris’s story is mostly an inspirational fathers-and-sons melodrama involving two Irish-Catholic Savannah families: the aristocratic and righteous Driscoll-Hartmans and the scrambling, parvenu O’Boyles. The story begins during the Civil War, when Captain Patrick Driscoll Jr., accompanied by his faithful slave Shadrach, hides the Driscoll family fortune in a jewel box on Raccoon Island, where Driscoll commands a Confederate island gun emplacement with the hopes of repulsing a Union attack on Savannah’s harbor. Both men die (Shadrach hugging his expiring master) without revealing the treasure’s location. Shadrach’s grandson, Abednigo, later hides his moonshine still on the island, while arriviste J.J. O’Boyle grows rich and politically powerful as a whiskey smuggler. Later, when hotheaded political reporter John Hartman, who’s married to Beth Dietz, the last of the Driscolls, checks into J.J.’s shady deals, J.J. forces Hartman to resign from the newspaper. Meanwhile, Anthony O—Boyle’s slightly retarded brother, Al, becomes a serial killer. Anthony’s solution to that problem, along with subsequent caddishness from Anthony’s son, Tony Jr., contrast with the naive goodness of Hartman, now a journalism teacher, and of his son, John-Morgan, who manages to stay a virgin throughout high school and the Vietnam War, where his wounds and his failure to marry the girl of his dreams almost make him lose his religion; meanwhile, Lloyd Bryan, son of the impoverished and estranged Abednigo, becomes a pro-football star but then renounces his success to become a priest and work with Savannah’s poor. Is it fate (or maybe the possibility of salvation?) that brings the gang—now middle- aged—back to Raccoon Island to dig up old sins and long-lost treasure? Cluttered, repetitious, yet ultimately uplifting reaffirmation of southern gentility, fair play, and blind faith. ($100,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 17, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-25495-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
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
BOOK REVIEW
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