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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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