On balance, an often touching tale of lovable grandparents that reads too much like a biography.
An Iowa farm girl who becomes the wife of an early aviator finds lifetime inspiration in the parallel track of Anne Morrow Lindbergh—in Hughes’s biographically nostalgic first novel.
Hughes recounts in flashback the story of a marriage begun in the ’30s and concluded sadly with the disappearance of the couple in their 80s on a round-the-world flying trip. Only daughter Ruth Sheehan of Cedar Bluff, Iowa, wants desperately to go to college and do something with her life, but she’s stuck out on the farm with her stern, aging parents when the young Air Mail pilot Henry Gutterson falls from the sky and into their cornfield. Ruth’s parents won’t pay for college and, indeed, expect nothing more from their daughter than that she marry a farmer and inherit their land. In letters to barnstormer Ruth Law, then to Mrs. Lindbergh, wife of world-famous Charles Lindbergh, Ruth vents her frustration—yet she falls in love with Henry and marries him gladly, since it’s through him and his stories of flying that Ruth sees the world. Hughes’s straightforward, rather bland narrative is told alternately from Ruth’s and then Henry’s point of view (as when a paralyzing depression seizes Ruth upon the death of her second child), and, much later, from their grown children’s: John and Margaret, who must piece together the puzzle of their missing parents. Poignantly, Ruth’s letters to Mrs. Lindbergh—who also navigated for her husband, then suffered the tragic loss of a child—fill in the emotional core of Ruth’s life as she finds peace in her incompletion. “She was always feeling, feeling, feeling,” Mrs. Lindbergh writes in the one reply—too late!—that she does send. Hughes’s tale aims to tear-jerk, but before tears the reader has to wrestle with a lot of dull accumulated detritus and not terrifically compelling prose.
On balance, an often touching tale of lovable grandparents that reads too much like a biography.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-05785-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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