Reading Pynchon may be likened to what one of his characters says here about deciphering the “equation” presented by the...
Ever since Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), which shared a National Book Award and was given, then denied a Pulitzer Prize (on account of its “obscenity”), it’s been obvious, even to much of the so-called literary establishment, that Thomas Pynchon is one of our contemporary classics: a true polymath, formidably learned and technically unparalleled, who understands as few of his readers can the essential symbiosis between C.P. Snow’s “two cultures” of science and technology. Pynchon’s long-awaited new novel (reportedly 20 years in the making) is a huge and almost uniformly entertaining tale set in the late-18th century and tracing the fortunes and follies of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, the British astronomers and surveyors who established the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that would divide young America between South and North, slaveholding and free—and unite the two scientists, despite their contrasting histories and temperaments, in a continuing quest for knowledge expressed as their “transits” from Old World to New, past to future, ignorance to transcendence. Their story is a contentious chronicle of tasks undertaken and both intellectual and bodily hungers satisfied to varying degrees, on several continents, and in the company of such historical worthies as Franklin and Washington and such scarcely less imposing counterparts as an erudite canine and a mechanical talking duck. Readers who are willing, therefore, to let Pynchon be Pynchon should tune in gratefully to this ambitious novel’s dizzy anachronisms and period fustian (its language closely recalls that of the book it otherwise resembles as well: John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor). Not all will cotton to Pynchon’s unregenerate wordplay (“Sirius business” may be his worst pun, though “Dutch Ado about nothing” runs it close), even if he does find a passable rhyme for “Philadelphia.” But the gags are strictly incidental, in a powerfully imagined vision of worlds in embryo and in collision that weds, as no fiction before, the romance of science with the romance of America.
Reading Pynchon may be likened to what one of his characters says here about deciphering the “equation” presented by the stars in their courses: “A lonely, uncompensated, perhaps even impossible Task,—yet some of us must be ever seeking it, I suppose.”Pub Date: April 30, 1997
ISBN: 0-8050-3758-6
Page Count: 773
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
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
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
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