Some may find shades of Walter Mitty in Henry Quantum, but this quirky love story is driven by angst, and heroes imagined or...
In Harding’s wry debut fiction, Henry Quantum’s major preoccupation is "the avoidance of pain," no doubt part of the reason he dropped out of a philosophy doctoral program to work in an advertising agency.
Perhaps pain avoidance is the reason he clings to his once-passionate 15-year marriage to Margaret even though he often now feels "the dark energy of her contempt." It’s Dec. 23 when Henry remembers he hasn’t purchased a Christmas gift for his wife. He leaves his office seeking Chanel No. 5 perfume. As he walks, Henry encounters Daisy, with whom he once had an affair. Henry’s a perfectly sketched character, his interior monologue—and there’s much of it—at times funny, at times profound. Margaret’s an achiever, but she’s now in the midst of an affair herself, no guilt or introspection evident. She drifted until marriage and then found supersuccess in high-level real estate. Daisy’s a realistic character, married young for security, now sometimes an unfocused ditz, but intelligent and ambitious enough to enroll post-divorce in an advanced neuroscience program. The San Francisco setting is perfectly mapped on the page, detailed from coffee shops to street characters. Covering only one day, the narrative gets rolling with a subtle sendup of Henry’s trendy advertising agency. After that, Henry goes on his perfume-seeking walkabout and ruminates on quantum physics, Heisenberg and mirror images, existentialism, the cosmic void, Zen Buddhism, and the artificiality of hiding behind psycho-buzzwords like guilt, deflection, and projection to analyze rather than resolve emotional conflict. Harding spins his tale in alternating segments from Henry’s, Margaret’s, and Daisy’s points of view, sometimes arch but nearly always empathetic, showing every fondness for his three damaged lovers.
Some may find shades of Walter Mitty in Henry Quantum, but this quirky love story is driven by angst, and heroes imagined or real are absent.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 9781501126802
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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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