Hunt brings to mind Flannery O’Connor’s grotesques and Barry Hannah’s bracingly inventive prose and cranks. He is strange,...
In 1920 Indiana, a threatened lynching becomes a magnet for two women navigating different physical and emotional paths in this engrossing work.
“You are speaking in originalities," says the heroine of Hunt’s previous novel (Neverhome, 2014, etc.). The line applies as well to the book's well-crafted writing, rich plot, and doughty lead, a woman disguised as a man in the Union Army during the Civil War. Hunt’s new book raises his own high bar further with an almost fablelike view of prejudice and cruelty some 60 years after emancipation. He calls whites cornsilks and blacks cornflowers, so the lynching stems from this allegation: "Some cornflowers shot a cornsilk and set a hundred houses on fire." The cornsilks head for the town of Marvel expecting to enjoy a “rope party.” One group’s adventures along the way are narrated by Ottie Lee Henshaw, secretary to a businessman and wife to Dale, owner of a massive pig. They get a flat tire, commandeer a mule-drawn wagon, visit a church supper and a prayer meeting, and find out more about themselves than they expected. The book’s second big section is narrated by Calla Destry, a tough teenage cornflower orphan who has been taken in by a local black couple and then, in other ways, by a smooth-talking cornsilk. That’s the man Calla sets out to find because she’s in trouble. Her meanderings occupy roughly the same time frame as the first half, while her different route intersects the others’ in intriguing ways. The split-screen view highlights and breaches the racial divide. The lynching remains mostly offstage. Hunt finds history or the big events useful framing devices, but he is more interested in how words can do justice to single players and life’s fraught moments.
Hunt brings to mind Flannery O’Connor’s grotesques and Barry Hannah’s bracingly inventive prose and cranks. He is strange, challenging, and a joy to read.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-39128-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
A masterly encapsulation of modern Russian history, this book more than fulfills the promise of Towles' stylish debut, Rules...
Sentenced to house arrest in Moscow's Metropol Hotel by a Bolshevik tribunal for writing a poem deemed to encourage revolt, Count Alexander Rostov nonetheless lives the fullest of lives, discovering the depths of his humanity.
Inside the elegant Metropol, located near the Kremlin and the Bolshoi, the Count slowly adjusts to circumstances as a "Former Person." He makes do with the attic room, to which he is banished after residing for years in a posh third-floor suite. A man of refined taste in wine, food, and literature, he strives to maintain a daily routine, exploring the nooks and crannies of the hotel, bonding with staff, accepting the advances of attractive women, and forming what proves to be a deeply meaningful relationship with a spirited young girl, Nina. "We are bound to find comfort from the notion that it takes generations for a way of life to fade," says the companionable narrator. For the Count, that way of life ultimately becomes less about aristocratic airs and privilege than generosity and devotion. Spread across four decades, this is in all ways a great novel, a nonstop pleasure brimming with charm, personal wisdom, and philosophic insight. Though Stalin and Khrushchev make their presences felt, Towles largely treats politics as a dark, distant shadow. The chill of the political events occurring outside the Metropol is certainly felt, but for the Count and his friends, the passage of time is "like the turn of a kaleidoscope." Not for nothing is Casablanca his favorite film. This is a book in which the cruelties of the age can't begin to erase the glories of real human connection and the memories it leaves behind.
A masterly encapsulation of modern Russian history, this book more than fulfills the promise of Towles' stylish debut, Rules of Civility(2011).Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-670-02619-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
At the outset, this might seem like minor Morrison (A Mercy, 2008, etc.), not only because its length is borderline novella,...
A deceptively rich and cumulatively powerful novel.
At the outset, this might seem like minor Morrison (A Mercy, 2008, etc.), not only because its length is borderline novella, but because the setup seems generic. A black soldier returns from the Korean War, where he faces a rocky re-entry, succumbing to alcoholism and suffering from what would subsequently be termed PTSD. Yet perhaps, as someone tells him, his major problem is the culture to which he returns: “An integrated army is integrated misery. You all go fight, come back, they treat you like dogs. Change that. They treat dogs better.” Ultimately, the latest from the Nobel Prize–winning novelist has something more subtle and shattering to offer than such social polemics. As the novel progresses, it becomes less specifically about the troubled soldier and as much about the sister he left behind in Georgia, who was married and deserted young, and who has fallen into the employ of a doctor whose mysterious experiments threaten her life. And, even more crucially, it’s about the relationship between the brother and his younger sister, which changes significantly after his return home, as both of them undergo significant transformations. “She was a shadow for most of my life, a presence marking its own absence, or maybe mine,” thinks the soldier. He discovers that “while his devotion shielded her, it did not strengthen her.” As his sister is becoming a woman who can stand on her own, her brother ultimately comes to terms with dark truths and deep pain that he had attempted to numb with alcohol. Before they achieve an epiphany that is mutually redemptive, even the earlier reference to “dogs” reveals itself as more than gratuitous.Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-59416-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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