Just in time for poolside reading, this elegant novel wears its intelligence lightly.
After her husband’s death, a Manhattan blue blood and mother of five receives a letter. Could her husband have had a secret second family?
According to an interview with Rieger (The Divorce Papers, 2014), about 25 percent of the people who have DNA testing learn that their fathers are people other than the men they thought they were. From that inspiration, she devised this assured novel of family, money, and secrets, reminiscent in theme and tone of Edith Wharton, though in Rieger’s world, those who err are not necessarily punished. Rupert Falkes, dropped off in his infancy on the steps of a British church, is a self-made man of the highest order, having come to the U.S., attended Yale Law School, and married the beautiful Eleanor Phipps, who comes from “that class of New Yorker whose bloodlines were traced in the manner of racehorses.” The Falkeses have five sons: Harry, a lawyer; Will, a Hollywood agent; Sam, a medical researcher; Jack, a genius musician; and Tom, a federal prosecutor. Two “married Jewish,” one is gay, all went to Princeton, and all adore their mother. When a woman named Vera Wolinski claims that her two grown sons are also Rupert’s and are thus entitled to a share of his estate, the family is thrown into disarray. Only Eleanor is calm—rather than get into DNA testing and court battles, she feels she “should do something for them.” Eleanor may have no burning need to know the truth (or perhaps she already knows it), but her sons don’t feel that way, and readers, of course, always want the scoop. Despite an omniscient narrator who lays out information as quickly and smoothly as a Vegas blackjack dealer, the argument of this book seems to be that we simply can’t know absolutely everything and it’s better that way. This is Eleanor’s view, certainly, and she is a character you don’t argue with.
Just in time for poolside reading, this elegant novel wears its intelligence lightly.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-90471-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.
Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Bright was from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.
Here is no saga of the underprivileged—no drama of social significance. Tenderness, which some felt was inherent in everything Steinbeck wrote, is muted almost to the vanishing point in this story of conflict within character, impact of character on character, of circumstances on personalities, of the difficult acceptance of individual choice as against the dominance of inherited traits. The philosophy is intimately interwoven with the pace of story, as he follows-from New England to California over some fifty odd years-the two families which hold stage center. There are the Trasks, brothers in two generations, strangely linked, strangely at war the one with the other; there are the Hamiltons (John Steinbeck's own forebears), a unique Irish born couple, the man an odd lovable sort of genius who never capitalizes on his ideas for himself, the tiny wife, tart, cold-and revealing now and again unexpected gentleness of spirit, the burgeoning family, as varied a tribe as could be found. And- on the periphery but integral to the deepening philosophy which motivates the story, there is the wise Chinese servant scholar and gentleman, who submerges his own goals to identify himself wholly with the needs of the desolate Adam Trask, crushed by his soulless wife's desertion, and the twin boys, Cal, violent, moody, basically strong enough to be himself—and Aron, gentle, unwilling to face disagreeable facts, beloved by all who met him. In counterpoint, the story follows too the murky career of Adam's wife, Cathy—who came to him from a mysteriously clouded past, and returned to a role for which she was suited—as a costly whore, and later as Madame in Salinas most corrupt "house," where the perversions of sex ridden males were catered to—and cruelty capitalized upon.Shock techniques applied with rapier and not bludgeon will rule the book out for the tender-skinned.
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1952
ISBN: 0142004235
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1952
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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