A fine-grained, if at times overly upholstered tale of humanitarian and political tragedy.
Natives, expats, and interlopers navigate the aftermath of Haiti’s violent 1991 coup.
Fountain’s second novel, following the National Book Critics Circle Award–winning Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2012), opens shortly after the deposition of Jean-Bertrand Aristide by the Caribbean nation’s military leaders. Matt Amaker, an American running a scuba-diving business for tourists, hopes the matter will soon blow over; but Audrey O’Donnell, a CIA agent managing money funneled into Haiti by the U.S. government, has a better glimpse of how upended the country is, to the point of getting a perverse thrill from it (“here was the world in miniature, a hothouse geopolitical lab where trends, functions, and methods were stripped bare for the interested student to view”); and Misha, a native Haitian and sister of Matt’s business partner, becomes a witness to the depths of the coup’s violence when she works as a clerk in a hospital struggling to keep up with the flood of victims. Desperate to keep working, Matt pursues a treasure-hunting scheme, heading to a quiet shore to find some cannons and other potentially lucrative remnants of a Spanish galleon. In the process, he digs up further trouble—and a metaphor for the long history of colonialist abuses that, Fountain suggests, keep driving Haiti to the brink. Fountain has made dozens of trips to Haiti, which fueled half the stories in his superb 2006 debut, Brief Encounters With Che Guevara (and made him an exemplar of Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours” rule for mastery); his grasp of the country’s folklore and history is worked satisfyingly deep into this book’s pages. But the execution can be disappointingly flat in comparison to other white-man-in-a-foreign-land practitioners like Paul Theroux, Norman Rush, Graham Greene, and Russell Banks; not quite a thriller about treasure-seeking nor a study of spycraft nor realist historical fiction, the book displays Fountain’s smarts but also meanders and lectures.
A fine-grained, if at times overly upholstered tale of humanitarian and political tragedy.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9781250776518
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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