Although the nastiness becomes repetitive, Coll’s vicious depiction of upper-upper-middle-class suburbia is often...
Coll (Beach Week, 2010, etc.) ratchets up the level of wit and mean edginess in her newest satire, which chronicles the absurd efforts put into marketing a high-end house outside Washington D.C.
Former Swedish tennis star Lars, an obese, pill-popping basket case since knee injuries stopped his career, is financially dependent on his wife, Bella, the highly visible executive in charge of “transparency” for a troubled multinational corporation. One of those seemingly unflappable, highly competent and enviably beautiful women whose life appears disgustingly charmed, Bella stays with Lars partly for the sake of their daughter, Elsa, and partly out of guilt over a decade-old infidelity that left Elsa’s paternity clouded. While Lars and Bella spend a few days in London, where the family is relocating for Bella’s career, Elsa remains at home with a nanny. After her pet rabbit, Dominique, runs away, Elsa—precocious but troubled and terribly lonely—bonds with Eve, a stager hired by the real estate agent to spruce up the property before its open house. Like Bella, Eve is a former journalist, but unlike Bella, Eve’s career and life paths have followed downward trajectories, and she approaches her work with a large dollop of bitterness, if not bile. By the time Elsa and her parents reunite, Lars is spiraling into a serious mental breakdown, unless he really is clairvoyant and able to speak to rabbits; Bella, who may be rekindling her old affair, is exposed as a full-blooded narcissist; Elsa is as unhappy and confused as ever; and Eve is at the breaking point. Thanks to bad drugs, bad smells and spilled red paint, marketing this house is a nightmare. Coll tells her story from the points of view of everyone involved, including Dominique. In fact, Dominique may be the sanest character in the book; after causing a lingering odor problem, the rabbit escapes early.
Although the nastiness becomes repetitive, Coll’s vicious depiction of upper-upper-middle-class suburbia is often excruciatingly funny.Pub Date: July 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-26881-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
PROFILES
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
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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