An excruciatingly interior story: plot and activity quickly fade in the face of remembrance, regret, and recrimination in a...
A lugubrious debut about the unhappy fate of four people stranded for the winter in a cabin in backwoods Montana.
Narrator Sling and his old Air Force buddy Richard Henson found themselves imprisoned by snow when they had to crash-land Henson’s Piper Cub in the wilderness of Glacier National Park. It was a good news/bad news kind of moment: Sling and Henson were alive, but they had no idea where they were, and their plane was too badly damaged to get them airborne again. Fortunately, they discovered a hunter’s cabin nearby and took shelter there. Both Sling and Henson had both been POWs in Vietnam, so the prospect of a winter in the woods wasn’t exactly the worst predicament they’d ever faced. But their private demons—alcoholism, divorce, and depression, for starters—have been eating away at both of them for decades, and the enforced solitude of their situation now gives them even less opportunity for escape than the Viet Cong did. Before long, the two men are joined by Daphne and Opal, twin sisters who’ve gotten lost in the woods while searching for their runaway dog. Young and naive, the sisters seem just as estranged from real life as Sling and Henson do, albeit with considerably less cause. As the four plod along from day to day in search of food and heat, their lives become reduced to the barest essentials—a process that seems to have begun long before they were stranded—and they have to reexamine the meaning of events they’ve tried for a long time simply to ignore.
An excruciatingly interior story: plot and activity quickly fade in the face of remembrance, regret, and recrimination in a carefully worked-out narrative that becomes suffocating after a while.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-57962-088-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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
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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