A first collection from veteran Goran (a memoir, The Bright Streets of Surfside, 1994, etc.) consists of 11 low-key stories set in and around an old neighborhood hangout—the Irish Club—where the locals get together to drink, to dance, and always to talk. The locale is working-class Pittsburgh in the years following WW II, a period when the fires from the steel mills still lit up the skies and jobs were plentiful. The mostly male habituÇs of the club, founded by the Ancient Order of Hibernians, Local No. 9, have known one another from boyhood—``they entered as children, put on years, wrinkles, and emerged on other spring evenings decades later accomplished drunkards.'' Protagonists are mostly Irish-Americans, though a Jewish neighbor, Clifton, is the narrator in several stories, including ``A Girl Like Sheila,'' ``The Madonna of the Jukebox,'' and ``The Road to Damascus,'' in which, respectively, Jimmy McKenna, a veteran obsessed with Sheila, a young woman, ends up being hospitalized for his violent behavior; an image of a woman, perhaps the Madonna, appears on the wall behind the club's jukebox, only to be painted over by the exasperated barkeeper, tired of the crowd sitting and watching it; and Neil, a noted philanderer, describes how he lost Deirdre when a friend of his waylaid her on her way to an assignation with him and told her she was ``too young to make decisions that'll stay with you forever.'' In other notable pieces, Conall O'Brien, who loves prostitutes, can't forget them even when he marries (``The Payment''); and Jack Lanahan, the high school art teacher, finds his ecstasy-inducing ``visits'' from the past more meaningful than his belated success as a sculptor (``The Last Visit''). A gritty and vibrantly ethnic Pittsburgh is the liveliest presence here. Otherwise, Goran's tales fail to strike a fresh note, seeming more like set-pieces with unsurprising characters behaving in predictable ways.
Pub Date: March 17, 1996
ISBN: 0-87338-539-X
Page Count: 144
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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