Well written but ill-conceived.
In poet/memoirist Spivack’s first novel (With Robert Lowell and His Circle, 2012, etc.), magic realism is used to explore the plight of post–World War II Jewish refugees in Manhattan.
At the New York Public Library, Herbert, a former Austrian official, finds a small bundle that contains the tiny, deformed body of his second cousin Anna. Called Rat for the white whiskers that frame her mouth, she has been mysteriously delivered from Leningrad. Rat is not the only person seeking Herbert’s help in the New World. The Tolstoi Quartet wants him to recover the four pinky fingers they had to surrender in order to leave Vienna with their lives. Somehow they know the pinkies are “waiting to be rejoined with their owners,” an only slightly implausible leap of faith for men who once shared beds with their animate instruments while their wives slept on the floor. Readers already know the fingers are in the possession of Dr. Felix, a Nazi posing as a pediatrician to New York’s refugee community. Even more bizarre than the idea that anyone would let Felix near their children, given the creepy way he behaves before ushering out the parents and molesting the kids, is the collection of body parts dispatched to him by the Nazis that he keeps in jars against the day when he can make them “live again.” Obviously none of this is meant to be realistic, and some point about survival and renewal seems to be intended. But it's lost in a text that has some truly vulgar scenes—Anna’s pre-Revolution interlude with Rasputin is soft-core pornographic—and an overall maddening vagueness. Images of Herbert’s son Michael appear over and over to make the point that his loss has fractured the family, but it’s never explained why delivering him to the death-camp boxcars would enable his equally Jewish father, mother, and brother to go free. A final scene of renewal in suburban America is, regrettably, unearned.
Well written but ill-conceived.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-35396-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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 Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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