An exploration of history, memory and the meaning of truth that never quite coheres as a story.
Weber (The Little Women, 2003, etc.) considers a notorious American tragedy, in her third novel.
Esther Gottesfeld is the last living survivor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Her granddaughter, Rebecca, is a neuroscientist. Rebecca’s lover George is a musical genius, someone who can turn the smell of new chalk or the amino acid sequences of polypeptides into song. The story begins with Esther’s oral history of the fire; it’s written in a style that’s as restrained and unadorned as the topic is sensational. Unfortunately, this riveting start is followed by a lengthy, painfully expository description of George’s career. While it may be good for the author to know so much about her character’s vocation, she needn’t relate a 40-page curriculum vitae. There are snippets of narrative—scenes in which Rebecca makes an appearance, the description of the death of a friend—but this is not so much a depiction of a life as the synopsis of a life. The chapter outlining Rebecca’s professional history isn’t any livelier. There’s substantially more backstory here than actual story, which turns on the possibility that Esther’s recollections of the fire—including her testimony in the case against the factory bosses—might not be true. Rebecca is first confronted with this possibility right after her grandmother dies, when she receives a call from Ruth Zion, a historian studying the fire. Weber assembles a lot of information—interview transcripts, courtroom transcripts, newspaper articles—but she doesn’t shape this material into a compelling narrative, nor does she create truly compelling characters. Ruth is an unfunny caricature of a feminist scholar. When they’re together, Rebecca and George are so cute and clever that they seem more like a vaudeville act than an actual couple. As for George’s strange—and exhaustively documented—musical gifts, they seem to belong to a different novel altogether.
An exploration of history, memory and the meaning of truth that never quite coheres as a story.Pub Date: June 22, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-28142-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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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