Hill takes time out from his notable series featuring detectives Dalziel and Pascoe for a longish (448 pp.) tale—first published in Britain in 1987, and very much in the mode of his WW I chronicle No Man's Land—of moral and political compromise, despair, and unexpected love in occupied France. The densely plotted story centers on Gunter Mai, a sympathetic lieutenant in the occupying German army who is obliged to canvass Paris for possible collaborators, and on Janine Simonian, a young woman who is obliged to enlist officially as an informant to the Abwehr in exchange for news about her wounded husband Jean-Paul. When JeanPaul returns to his family, partly amnesiac and transfixed by hatred of the Germans, Janine, drawing away from him, becomes gradually more dependent on Mai; and when her mother-in-law and two children are rounded up in a pogrom, she offers herself to Mai again. Even though she has no secrets to betray and he does not want to use her, they make a second bargain, preventing the children (though not their grandmother) from being shipped to Auschwitz. In the meantime, Jean-Paul has become one of the most flamboyant members of the Resistance; and when Janine and Mai make a third bargain (the children have been seized again, this time in Toulouse), her bogus information coincides with a tip having fatal consequences for Jean-Paul and his colleagues. Hill's account of Janine's collaboration is grimly ironic: she never intentionally gives Mai any information; he is unable to restore any of her loved ones and after the liberation reverses political sympathies; she is branded her husband's betrayer by the very citizens who had been collaborating more fully themselves. A moving, richly textured account of an inhuman military occupation and the all-too-human loyalties it spawns. In Hill's view of war, there can only be losers.
Pub Date: July 14, 1989
ISBN: 0586204539
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Countryman
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1989
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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