With spare, lean prose, British novelist Edric (The Broken Lands, 2001, etc.) creates a haunting and disturbing meditation...
A despairing portrait of humanity as it exists on Britain’s Fenland coast at the end of WWII.
Concealed in the dunes, James Mercer watches as 15-year-old Mary Lynch walks the shores of the Fens in the summer of 1946. The moment is significant. Mercer spends much of this somber tale carefully observing the inhabitants of a small village and the workers who have come there to dismantle, under his supervision, gun platforms built during the war. Mercer also studies, then becomes engaged with two men: Jacob Haas, a Dutch Jew and concentration camp survivor mourning the loss of his sister Anna; and Mathias Weisz, a German soldier captured at Normandy by the British. Regarding their experiences from his home in a tower at the edge of an abandoned airfield, Mercer realizes that life in this “wasteland” during peacetime will scarcely differ from their desperate existences on the continent during wartime. In trenchant dialogues, Mercer and his acquaintances look to the dark past and the bleak future. Haas, in failing health, recalls sadistic and harrowing camp incidents, one of which took the life of his sister. Weisz remembers the dissolution of his home. Mercer gradually becomes more actively committed to the lives around him. He moves to defend Lynch from her crude, bullying father and to protect Haas from the violent anti-Semitism of workers who fear the loss of their jobs and the inevitable dissolution of the village, which Edric renders in stark images. Seeking refuge from an angry mob, Weisz and Haas again find themselves in hiding; the postwar period brings no significant change or improvement to their lives. The war, Mercer observes, “still clung to everything it had once touched.”
With spare, lean prose, British novelist Edric (The Broken Lands, 2001, etc.) creates a haunting and disturbing meditation about an empty, abandoned world passing through a meaningless transition.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-552-77206-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Black Swan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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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Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of...
Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest (Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.
Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today-like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of poignancy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
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