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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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