Vansittart’s alluring gem is an exhilaration, a sigh, a prose poem that resembles a standard novel only in length. Lacking...
A delectable work of lyric fiction offers an aural snapshot of Paris in the time of Napoleon III, glimpsed through the eternally wandering eyes of mythic trickster Hermes.
While giving short shrift to proper plot, Vansittart (A Safe Conduct, 1996, etc.) inscribes language on these pages with the lush attentiveness of an adoring craftsman. Hermes is a night creature, “favouring darkened pavements, thieves’ kitchens, backwater taverns at crossroads or in the remains of woodlands”; with amused detachment, he watches “the constant procession, cheerful, purposeless, stung into fresh being by the New Year promise.” Properly, Hermes in Paris is a historical, its story strung through the unstable, socially and culturally tumultuous mid-ninth century. Yet the period is less a backdrop to the action than a player in the lives of Vansittart’s characters, though they believe themselves both exempt from, and superior to, their time. The young journalist Charles-Luc de Massonier, pen name “Tacitus,” finds the mediocrity of his cultural hour offensive to his own clear genius; he fusses and fulminates and is ultimately brought low in a duel by powers much greater than his own. Hermes accompanies Etienne and his ten-year-old son, Emile, as they wander through their jobs, amusements, and afternoon fields of grass. As is usual with atmospheric language, the prose here is highly impressionistic, and Hermes’ voice caresses details as if seizing upon any permanency he can find: wine glasses, dinnerware, butler’s vests, and soldier’s breastplates exist as the vivid auras within which these deluded, vague, but touching human souls thrive. The substantial introduction strives but fails to locate the novel in any meaningful historical context.
Vansittart’s alluring gem is an exhilaration, a sigh, a prose poem that resembles a standard novel only in length. Lacking the poised densities of plot and character to ground it, it’s caviar for the happy few.Pub Date: April 12, 2001
ISBN: 0-7206-1106-7
Page Count: 234
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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