Delightfully gossipy, psychologically insightful and historically fascinating.
Princeton professor Gee’s lively, highly literate debut explores the historical figures and events satirized in Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock.”
The uneasy peace of Queen Anne’s reign—marred by growing Whig-Tory animosity, anti-Catholic bias and stray pockets of rebellious Jacobites hoping to restore the deposed Catholic James II to the now Protestant throne—is the backdrop for high society frolics. Thanks to a small, growing literary reputation, Pope, though born into the Catholic merchant class and crippled by tuberculosis, gets to spend the 1711 social season in London, the guest of a fashionable portrait painter. Also in town are the Blount sisters, looking for marital matches despite their Catholicism and lack of money. Pope thinks he is in love with the charming Teresa but comes to share a deeper connection with her sister Martha. Also husband-hunting is the Blounts’ wealthier, flashier cousin Arabella Fermor, whom Teresa unsuccessfully tries to emulate. For all her haughty demeanor, Arabella remains an innocent in love until she falls passionately for Robert, Lord Petre, a rich Catholic aristocrat. Robert falls equally hard for Arabella. Carrying on a semi-secret affair, Arabella assumes she is about to become Robert’s wife and thus a baroness. But Robert has also mixed himself up in an ill-conceived Jacobite plot. When his parents learn he has risked the family’s reputation, they require him to give up not only his political intriguing but also Arabella. He is quickly affianced to a less attractive but wealthier heiress. Robert cannot bring himself to tell Arabella, but he accepts a silly dare to cut off a lock of her hair at a party. Arabella is humiliated, especially when she discovers his engagement, but then shows unexpected depth of character. Meanwhile, Pope is asked to write a satire to make light of the incident, thus diffusing hostility between the two prominent families. The poem launches Pope’s career.
Delightfully gossipy, psychologically insightful and historically fascinating.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4056-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
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
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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