An unpleasant, often exasperating melodrama about the great divide between two lovers.
The literary version of old Polaroids: moments in time that are little more than flashes of a dysfunctional relationship.
In his debut novel, writer, bookseller and editor Sampsell (Creamy Bullets, 2008, etc.) strongly mimics his memoir (A Common Pornography, 2010) and short stories with a fragmented, splintered novel about a postmodern relationship. It’s all meant to be confessional and honest but comes off just like the experimental hipster lit that it mirrors. The unnamed narrator is a hotel clerk and a divorcee with a preteen son. While still married, he met a woman with a daughter, and that was that. He’s a real creep, obsessive about sex, seeking out pornography starring women who look like his partner. And yes, it’s still too early to be playing sex games pretending your member is one of the 9/11 airplanes. Not to mention he’s the guy who says stupid things like “I wanted to become a room of air for you to breathe in.” She, meanwhile, is a depressive with mood swings who’s given to doing things like strapping on goggles before smashing up dishes in the kitchen. During the fragment when they’re separated, one has to wonder why the hell they would ever come back together. The book’s real sin, however, is that it all feels so counterfeit, a fantasy played out in bars and strip clubs. The kids are an afterthought—window dressing for the illusion of domesticity. Every now and then, readers get to meet the partner’s brother, Daniel, who’s prone to hitting on the narrator and masturbating for his entertainment. It’s all very poetic, though, and that’s another problem. “You and I found each other and tried to run away from our poisons and sadness,” Sampsell writes. “You looked for freedom. I looked for escape. Once a leaver, always a leaver. Sometimes I feel like we’re just keeping an eye on each other.”
An unpleasant, often exasperating melodrama about the great divide between two lovers.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-935639-70-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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