Elegant Babe's thoughts, if not her lips, are unsealed at last. Those unaware of the scandal get CliffsNotes; and everyone...
Class, cliques, and cattiness converge in this New York fable based on the lives of Truman Capote and his greatest fan, Babe Paley.
As it happens, Benjamin (The Aviator’s Wife, 2013, etc.) puts more honey than vinegar in her rendering of the disarming palship between the openly gay author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and his much-married “Bobolink”—Barbara “Babe” Cushing Mortimer Paley, the outwardly towering, inwardly cowering Upper East Side matron he squired around town for a quarter century. A chorus of the couple’s BFFs provides commentary on their history, as Benjamin spirals chirpily through the hedonistic '50s, '60s, and '70s, cherry-picking scenes of their first, chance weekend together at the Paleys' compound in Jamaica (“So many wanted to catch him at it! Watch as genius burned!”), thick as thieves over lunch at Le Cirque, or swapping confidences about their narcissistic mothers—more craved than kisses—at slumber parties in the Hamptons, all the way through to the publication of Capote’s masterpiece, In Cold Blood, and his infamous Black and White masquerade ball. The event that allegedly drove them apart—when Truman mauled Babe and her set in thinly disguised print—has been raked over repeatedly by critics, filmmakers, and biographers (including Babe’s friend Slim Keith—one of the Kenneth-coiffed swans alluded to in the title), so it's no surprise when the novel re-creates some iconic moments leading up to the rift: such as when Truman notices for the first time that Babe's husband—CBS executive William S. Paley—smiles "like a man who had just swallowed an entire human being." (Capote recognizes a keeper—and files it away “in his photographic memory, to be used at a later date.”) The character Benjamin takes most imaginative liberty with, naturally, is Babe—the cool cucumber in Mainbocher who (the chatter went) could brush off her husband’s wolfishness with practiced ease and neither bleeped a word against nor spoke to her literary pet again after he published "La Cote Basque 1965."
Elegant Babe's thoughts, if not her lips, are unsealed at last. Those unaware of the scandal get CliffsNotes; and everyone else gets a chance to judge whether a swan’s muteness can be more interesting than her gripe.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-52869-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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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