There’s a decent novel somewhere in here, but it’s obscured and trivialized by sentimental religiosity.
An enigmatic parable is grafted onto an impressively detailed retelling of the ordeals endured by William Tecumseh Sherman’s Army of the Tennessee, in a London-based Civil War buff’s unusual first novel.
The year is 1862, and Sherman’s division is poised to fight the bloody Battle of Shiloh when the gruff Union general encounters a young boy hiding in the woods, who answers to the name Jesse Davis, and rather portentously declares, “I came to serve you.” Jesse immediately becomes a godsend to Sherman’s exhausted troops, mastering nursing skills, writing letters for the men and reading to them, comforting the wounded and dying, speaking in “a voice that was neither feminine nor masculine but something in between, which could lift the lowest of spirits and transport the most downhearted, to a place of optimism and light.” Who and what Jesse really is may surprise the surgeons and officers who discover the ministering angel’s secret, but it won’t surprise many readers. Nevertheless, whenever Gylanders concentrates on military actions and behind-the-lines daily routines—whether tracking the vacillations of Sherman’s formidable intellect and fiery temper, detailing strategies planned and shared with U.S. Grant’s Army of the Potomac or charting the southward course that will lead Sherman toward Atlanta and near-Armageddon—the narrative becomes both absorbing and thoroughly convincing. It’s Gylanders’s bad luck that this novel will inevitably be compared with E.L. Doctorow’s very recent (and much superior) The March. But bad luck can’t be blamed for the numbingly banal iterations of both historical facts and genre clichés (e.g., “Whoring and boozing had been as much a part of the soldier’s life as marching and fighting since Roman times”). And the flagrantly symbolic figure of Jesse is much more a distraction than a crucial story element.
There’s a decent novel somewhere in here, but it’s obscured and trivialized by sentimental religiosity.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-6514-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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