Some will savor the abundance of period detail and the mordant wit that lace the author’s melancholy tale. Others will wish...
A dying woman hands on an unfinished manuscript to a young student, in a murky, prolix tale by Stern (Plague of Dreamers, 1994, etc.).
Saul Bozoff is 19 when, in 1969, he arrives in New York City. From Memphis, this neurotic, virginal, self-pitying character also steps straight from the pages of Woody Allen, Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud. Feeling alienated at NYU, he looks up his aunt, Keni Shendeldecker, on the Lower East Side. As the two walk neighborhood streets (Stern etches them sharply in their grimy, late ’60s glory), it becomes clear, as reality blends with fantasy, that Aunt Keni literally sees the fabled “Lower East Side of antiquity”—the bakeries, restaurants, and butcher shops of the early 1900s. Before long, Saul as well sees literal manifestations of the past and becomes intrigued by Keni’s account of a brief marriage to Nathan Hart, proofreader at the Forward and author of an unfinished manuscript. Hart’s story, Keni says, was “a screwball affair. . . about an angel that comes to earth and has by a human girl a child.” As Keni dies, she gives the manuscript to Saul, urging him to finish the story. Nathan’s tale thereupon comes to life, as does his narrative of the angel Mockie and his earthly son Nachman. Saul, meanwhile, in surreal and picaresque sequences, shares a commune, explores Prague and, finally, at 35, settles down to finishing Nathan’s story. The time periods of the three narratives offer Stern rich potential, and therein lies the problem: He seems never to have met a detail, character or subplot he didn’t like, unleashing a torrent of verbiage that obscures and overwhelms his considerations of art and reality, heaven and earth.
Some will savor the abundance of period detail and the mordant wit that lace the author’s melancholy tale. Others will wish he’d get on with it.Pub Date: March 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03387-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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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