A promising writer gives the love triangle an engaging workout under challenging constraints.
An uneven debut has fun with James Joyce while packing years of a family’s life into a single day.
Taking its title from the date on which Joyce set Ulysses, Lang’s novel concerns the Portman family of Philadelphia on the 2004 centennial of what’s known as Bloomsday. Brothers Stephen and Leopold, with the latter’s fiancee, Nora, prepare for the funeral of Grandma Hannah Portman, which takes place only hours before the annual Bloomsday party thrown by the brothers’ parents. Nora recalls her mother’s funeral a year earlier following a long battle with cancer: “She and her mom had been stranded on an island, the tropic of cancer with its thickets of growth.” Lang works disease, aging, death, sibling friction and fraying love into the novel’s brief time frame mainly through the wandering thoughts of the three younger characters. The richest moments stem from Stephen’s friendship with Nora and his empathy with Hannah, formed through weekly visits to her retirement home. By contrast, the parents are thinly drawn, almost types: the wealthy former fund manager and the socialite seeking a good cause. It’s uncertain if either has ever read Ulysses through, which raises the fundamental question of why such people would name their sons for the novel’s two heroes and honor a notoriously obscure book every year. Lang’s numerous allusions to Joyce’s epic may amuse those in the know, but they don’t often enhance the story. She can draw a sharp image—“another old-timer, a fluff of white hair over a stick of a body, like a Q-tip”—yet the writing is dotted with clichés or oddities, such as: “Their friendship bobs between them like a current, keeping Leo at bay.” That’s a lot of water.
A promising writer gives the love triangle an engaging workout under challenging constraints.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4574-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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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