A reader meeting Ford via these three pieces might wonder why laurels of the Pulitzer and PEN/Faulkner kind have befallen this (The Sportswriter, 1986; Independence Day, 1995) particular writer. He here offers two grinding tales of distasteful Americans in Paris and one clone-of-Hemingway story about a boyhood in Montana. In "The Womanizer," Martin Austin, married but childless, becomes interested in a Frenchwoman named Josephine when he's in Paris on business. The difficulty is—for Austin and for the reader—that he seems not to know what he wants either with her or from her, with the result that Ford offers page after page of clunky vacuity as if simply to put something between start and the end of the story ("He wasn't looking for a better life. He wasn't looking for anything. He loved his wife, and he hoped to present to Josephine Belliard a different human perspective from the ones she might be used to"). More revelatory in this unrelenting non-tale is what Ford says of Austin later—that "very little pleased him much at all." The main character in "Occidentals" is, if anything, even more dreary than Austin. Ex-academic Charley Matthews has written a novel about his divorce and is now quite joylessly in Paris—with mistress Helen—to meet his French publisher and translator. Trouble is, as he quickly discovers, both are out of town for a few days, so he'll have to wait. Helen—a lively ex-dancer who's suffering from cancer—tries to cheer him up; he grows only more hatefully dour, though, until she takes things—perhaps believably to some—into her own hands. "Jealousy" makes for a breath of fresh air with its Montana landscape and Hemingway-esque economies—as a boy, accompanied by his attractive young aunt, witnesses a saloon killing on a snowy night before catching a train to Seattle. Scraps and leavings, seemingly, caught between the labored and the imitated.
Pub Date: June 20, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-45469-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
Constructed with delicacy, lyricism, and care, Hertmans’ novel still feels occasionally static.
A Christian woman and a Jewish man fall in love in medieval France.
In 1088, a Christian girl of Norman descent falls in love with the son of a rabbi. They run away together, to disastrous effect: Her father sends knights after them, and though they flee to a small southern village where they spend a few happy years, their budding family is soon decimated by a violent wave of First Crusaders on their way to Jerusalem. The girl, whose name becomes Hamoutal when she converts to Judaism, winds up roaming the world. Hertmans’ (War and Turpentine, 2016, etc.) latest novel is based on a true story: The Cairo Genizah, a trove of medieval manuscripts preserved in an Egyptian synagogue, contained an account of Hamoutal’s plight. Hamoutal makes up about half of Hertmans’ novel; the other half is consumed by Hertmans’ own interest in her story. Whenever he can, he follows her journey: from Rouen, where she grew up, to Monieux, where she and David Todros—her Jewish husband—made a brief life for themselves, and all the way to Cairo, and back. “Knowing her life story and its tragic end,” Hertmans writes, “I wish I could warn her of what lies ahead.” The book has a quiet intimacy to it, and in his descriptions of landscape and travel, Hertmans’ prose is frequently lovely. In Narbonne, where David’s family lived, Hertmans describes “the cool of the paving stones in the late morning, the sound of doves’ wings flapping in the immaculate air.” But despite the drama of Hamoutal’s story, there is a static quality to the book, particularly in the sections where Hertmans describes his own travels. It’s an odd contradiction: Hertmans himself moves quickly through the world, but his book doesn’t quite move quickly enough.
Constructed with delicacy, lyricism, and care, Hertmans’ novel still feels occasionally static.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4708-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Light on surprises and character development, this tepid thriller will have most astute readers correctly guessing the...
An accident forces a man to return to his small Iowa hometown and confront violent secrets from his past, ones he’s kept hidden from his wife.
Sarah Quinlan thought she knew everything about her husband, Jack: an accident killed his parents when he was 15 so he left Penny Gate, Iowa, and has only been back once. But when the couple gets news that Jack’s beloved aunt Julia, who raised Jack and his younger sister, Amy, after their parents’ deaths, is gravely injured in a fall, the prodigal son returns. Gudenkauf (Little Mercies, 2014, etc.) makes it clear from the start that nothing should be taken at face value, not Jack’s story about his parents (his mother was actually bludgeoned to death, and his father, now MIA, was the prime suspect) or the seemingly idyllic small-town atmosphere. This, however, does little to heighten the suspense as advice columnist Sarah takes on the role of amateur detective in sniffing out Quinlan family secrets past and present. Through her we meet Jack’s terse cousin Dean and his too-perfect wife, Celia, along with Julia’s husband, Hal, who became like a father to Jack in the wake of his own family tragedy, and Amy, who couldn’t be more stereotypically “troubled.” Jack and Amy’s tragic past, which becomes the central mystery of the plot once Sarah figures out that her husband has been lying to her for two decades, is tied to Julia’s not-so-accidental fall, but only for the purposes of a neatly sewn-up plot.
Light on surprises and character development, this tepid thriller will have most astute readers correctly guessing the ending halfway through.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7783-1865-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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