Subjective perspectives in a fictionalized portrait of a disappeared architect.
Beckley’s debut details the life of architect Robert A. Michael, who disappeared and possibly committed suicide. Michael embodied the ego and genius of modernism, but also its uncompromising excess. With an almost megalomaniacal personality, he ordered his life to his own specifications; when the world didn’t respond with recognition, he left it. Though his lavish lifestyle included fancy cars and incredibly expensive originals of famous furniture designs from Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, his personal life was fraught with issues: In her chapter, his first wife reveals multiple affairs; his daughter details the demands he required for the house he designed for her; he seduced his publicist; he invited a colleague to an interview seemingly in order to use her skin color to secure a project. Michael’s designs, though beautiful, required huge expense—and huge sacrifice. His love of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and its protagonist, Howard Roark, ended in disappointment as he slowly realized that the age of the heroic architects he idolized was over, steamrolled by selection committees, predatory real estate deals and weak press. By fictionalizing the narration as first-person accounts of friends, family and colleagues, Beckley provides a unique insight into Michael’s character, preferring to make him an outsider in his own story. Stylistically, Beckley achieves a kind of compromise between journalistic distance and empathy: “Robert abruptly pulled into a drive whose massive iron gates opened as if at his command. The gates closed behind us as I thought, Robert now has his prey.” However, many of the “interviews” feel inconsequential; they sometimes include various references to simple troubles, such as work complaints, while summarizing instead of creating powerful scenes: “The place I was working had really neat people who held potluck dinners every other Friday night where everyone would bring their kids and pitch in and we’d talk about what we were reading, smoke some pot, and drink cheap wine.” For much of the work, Michael’s disappearance and death feel like peripheral concerns, though many readers will find those concerns among the story’s most intriguing.
An extended human interest piece in the guise of a multiple-perspective novel, made tired by its mundane plots.
Pub Date: May 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491734452
Page Count: 182
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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