Maybe Nat King Cole will always be something of a hallowed enigma among the great American musical icons. But one would...
A historical novel places Nat King Cole, as seen through the eyes of an ill-starred friend, at the epicenter of mid-20th-century America’s racial transformation.
In April 1956, Cole, at the crest of his widespread, cross-cultural renown as a pop vocalist, was assaulted by white supremacists while performing at the Birmingham State Theater in his native Alabama. Six months later, he became the first African-American to headline his own TV variety series, just as the epochal bus boycott led by Martin Luther King Jr. was about to enter its second year. Howard, whose previous novel, Like Trees, Walking (2007), was inspired by a real-life lynching, conflates these events into a novel of reimagined history in which the attack on Cole is pushed a decade back to Montgomery just after World War II. An ex-GI and childhood friend of Cole’s named Nathanial Weary thrusts himself between a pipe-wielding racist and the singer's head. Weary is charged with inciting a riot and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Upon his release, he's hired by Cole—who’s never forgotten his friend’s sacrifice—as his bodyguard and driver in Hollywood. Within this revisionist framework, Howard seeks to recount through Weary’s voice the harsh truths of postwar Jim Crow as it comes under direct siege in the 1950s. That narrative voice—tough, shrewd, barely containing the hurt from public and private injustices—is the novel's finest attribute. And yet, readers may lose their moorings within the novel’s time-shifting tactics. Not that there’s anything wrong with shifting facts in fiction for the sake of larger truths; some great Western films have come from such tactics. But you’re never altogether sure at the start of each chapter whether you’re in the '40s or the '50s. Such uncertainty contributes to a gauzy, almost dreamlike aura that makes the characters, even the stoic Weary, elusive, almost spectral figures. This is especially frustrating with the novel’s depiction of Cole, who is conceived with much charm, some quirky nervous tics and not much else.
Maybe Nat King Cole will always be something of a hallowed enigma among the great American musical icons. But one would think even a delicately woven novel that dares to reconfigure historical events might have taken more risks with its characterizations.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-052961-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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