Strong writing throughout, however, from a very promising writer with a world-class imagination.
An earnest debut novel painstakingly records an uprooted black woman’s recovery of her scattered family’s even more scattered history.
In 1976, Helene Strickland travels from Washington, DC (where she works in a nursing home), to Arkansas’s impoverished Lafayette County when summoned by her estranged mother Queen Ester—who had abandoned baby Helene to be raised by the child’s warmhearted Aunt Annie b (sic). After learning that Annie b has died, Helene confronts her mother, who does allow her daughter into her house, and, to a limited extent, her memories. Reynolds then juxtaposes Helene’s inquiries about the anger and contention that have consumed her family’s generations with detailed flashbacks (presented, oddly, as omniscient narrative rather than from the viewpoint of a specific character, remembering). We gradually learn of the rise to property ownership and security of Helene’s itinerant maternal grandmother Liberty, herself a child abandoned, by both her parents. Then Liberty’s story is connected to that of Chester “Chess” Hubbert, the son of Mississippi tenant farmers victimized by the flooding of hastily constructed levees: a rootless, sexually confused charmer whose vertiginous careening from one woman to another eventually involved him with both Liberty (who took the wanderer in) and teenaged Queen Ester, in a combustible “batch of love and hate cooked up all together” that could only produce envy, hatred, and catastrophe. Reynolds creates striking, brooding, indisputably real characters and writes about them with assurance and lyric grace. But Knee Deep in Wonder (a strange title, incidentally) is structurally suspect, especially when its illogical deployment of viewpoints is stretched further, late in the novel, to accommodate those of both Chess and a man known as “other,” who seems to hold the final piece to the puzzle that Helene is laboriously assembling.
Strong writing throughout, however, from a very promising writer with a world-class imagination.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2003
ISBN: 0-8050-7346-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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