Bandbox pulses with a comic energy and detail reminiscent of T.C. Boyle at his most entertainingly manic: it’s a wonderful...
Manhattan period melodrama, handled with roguish finesse.
The byzantine plot begins with a daringly extended exposition in which Mallon, author of other historically based fiction (Henry and Clara, 1994; Dewey Beats Truman, 1997, etc.), introduces nearly two dozen characters. Foremost is Jehoshaphat “Joe” Harris, world-weary editor-in-chief of the struggling men’s monthly magazine Bandbox (think Esquire), in a death struggle with rival publication Cutaway, edited by Harris’s semi-scrupulous former employee Jimmy Gordon. The time is the mid-1920s. Journalists and their molls talk tough, drink hard, and mingle with such varied celebs as (fictional) film seductress Rosemary La Roche and (historical) crime boss Arnold Rothstein. Harris’s bibulous vaudeville reporter “Cuddles” Houlihan pines for his lissome—and plucky—gal assistant Becky Walter. Suave columnist Stuart Newman disgraces Bandbox in a drunken meeting with president Calvin Coolidge. Smoldering photographer’s model Waldo Lyndstrom’s bisexual misadventures necessitate payoffs to police. Novelist-columnist Max Stanwick (a razor-sharp caricature of bon vivant Ben Hecht) moves in and out of criminous environments with Cagney-like aplomb. An animal-loving fact-checker sets out to rescue animals stashed in unsafe conditions for use by a phlegmatic staff photographer. A rigged fiction contest threatens to topple the magazine’s credibility. And when Bandbox subscriber dewy-eyed Indianan John Shepard arrives in NYC and meets his raffish journalistic gods, an indiscreet remark prompted by his overindulgence in “near-beer” gets the kid kidnapped by Rothstein’s goons and spirited away to a California ranch. Somehow Harris’s feisty mag survives this “swirl of plagiarism, narcotics-selling . . . public drunkenness” and other embarrassments. Lost are found, lovers united, and Jehoshaphat trumps the ineffably slimy Gordon and lives to fight another day.
Bandbox pulses with a comic energy and detail reminiscent of T.C. Boyle at his most entertainingly manic: it’s a wonderful ride, and a quantum leap beyond Mallon’s earlier fiction. Ragtime in double-time.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-42116-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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