A book with lots of laughs that's also very bleak.
A frequently funny subversion of the coming-of-age story, though there’s a pervasive sadness underlying the comic.
This promising debut novel sustains itself through the strength of its voice—the first-person narration of Eli Schwartz and the distinctive voice of author Wilson. A pudgy, jobless, stay-at-home 20-year-old with a passion for cooking and an ambivalence toward sex, Eli describes himself as “a glorified townie without the glory. No rugged good looks or blue-collar gas-station-employee pride. No fading memory of a football career. No greaser girlfriend, legs thick and strong like the twin pistons on my (nonexistent) restored Camaro.” Eli might easily be described as a loser and a stoner, but the novel seduces the reader into identifying with him, caring about him, rather than treating him (as some others do) as an object of ridicule. “I’m a good soul who’s gone a bit off the deep end,” he explains. His well-to-do father left his mother for a second marriage and family and took his standard of living with him. His older brother left for college, keeping Eli in a claustrophobic relationship with the mother who encourages it (at least until she also discovers life beyond Eli and threatens to leave as well). The plot’s pivotal encounter involves Seymour Kahn, a veteran actor whose roles have diminished because he's in a wheelchair but whose sexual appetite remains omnivorous. Kahn enters Eli’s life as a surrogate father, potential lover, sexual procurer and/or drug buddy, after he becomes interested in buying the family home that Eli’s mother needs to sell. The repressed, apathetic Eli and the profane, uninhibited Kahn make for an odd couple, though Eli acknowledges, “I’m afraid of becoming Kahn, but part of me knows I’m already Kahn, that he’s the part of me I want to keep away from the world. I think Kahn might be in love with me.” Though the voice is strong and the characters indelible, the author rejects the resolution of a typical rite of passage. Instead, it doesn’t offer much resolution at all (except for Kahn), as Eli conjures 20 possible endings, committing to none.
A book with lots of laughs that's also very bleak.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-209033-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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
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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