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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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