"Lives of quiet desperation"—or a literary study of hapless people living unhappy lives.
Prize-winning short-fiction author Bartelmay debuts with literary fiction unraveling the fate of six snakebit souls.
The setting is Middleville, near Peoria, Ill., doubtless symbolic for American life circa 1950-2000. Chic Waldbeeser is the younger son in a dysfunctional family. Diane von Schmidt is a teacher’s daughter. In 1950, the two marry immediately after high school, honeymoon clumsily in Florida and settle down to be supported by Chic’s employment in a pumpkin processing plant. Chic’s father, a traumatized World War I veteran, had committed suicide. Chic’s brother, Buddy, turned 18, left home and became an itinerant coin dealer. Their detached mother lurks in Florida. Chic is emotionally stunted, unambitious, befuddled by reality and not very smart. Diane is jealous of Lijy, Buddy’s wife, an Indian woman from California, her resentment sparked by Chic’s undisguised admiration of Lijy’s sensuality. Chic and Diane produce a prodigy son, whom neither parent understands. Still a child, the son drowns. Diane falls into depression, comforted by food and Norman Vincent Peale. Sexually naïve and stymied Chic, lonely and introverted, stumbles through a life soon fractured when Lijy has an affair, becomes pregnant and asks Chic to accept responsibility, foolishly believing Buddy will be more forgiving. The narrative flits back and forth in time, weaving in the saga of Buddy and Lijy, whose marriage collapses and then reforms after they open a health-food store and massage salon. Into the Middleville mess drop Green Geneseo and Mary Norwood. Green, a retired Las Vegas bank teller, fancies himself a bookie. Mary, married multiple times, has been a pool hustler and barmaid. Both want someone to take care of them; neither can care for the other; and Chic is soon caught up in their mutual misery. Symbolism and metaphor are rife as the story unfolds, and only Buddy, Lijy and their son lurch toward happiness, while Chic remains mired in existential crisis, too ignorant to understand and too inept to overcome.
"Lives of quiet desperation"—or a literary study of hapless people living unhappy lives.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-935439-77-6
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
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
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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