A sinister message that may not be all that far-fetched.
A young woman navigates the treacherous terrain of Manhattan’s early 1950s literary scene.
If only Louise, Woods’ plucky heroine, had any idea of exactly how treacherous literati can be. A transplant from Ossining, Louise is writing a “romantic fantasy” called The Lunar Housewife, set in an indeterminate but far from post-Soviet future. Chapters from Lunar, the novel within this novel, are interspersed throughout, as Louise writes while trying to negotiate real life in 1953. Pulling off an interview with Ernest Hemingway, she hopes to gain credibility and a byline at Downtown, the new magazine her boyfriend, Joe, and his colleague Harry founded, mixing intellectual commentary with cheesecake, like Playboy or Esquire—although the author’s note reveals it’s actually based on the Paris Review. The parlance is convincingly of the ’50s, and Woods’ phrases are well turned. Increasingly, Lunar Housewife tracks Louise’s life: Both Louise and her protagonist, Katherine, encounter boyfriends and governments one can’t quite trust—Joe may be embroiled with the CIA, and Harry fears that his apartment is bugged. Katherine, an American defector to Soviet Russia, is sent to set up housekeeping on the moon with Sergey, a Soviet army deserter–turned-cosmonaut; as the two fall in love, they are monitored by a “visio-telespeaker.” Louise and her creation each become pregnant, which amps up the parallel dangers. Louise’s portrayal of Russians as human and Hemingway’s putative novel in progress praising Castro might be endangering both authors. (Woods’ “Papa” may be a cliché, but he’s a scene-stealer.) During this time of the House Un-American Activities Committee, with the Korean War winding down and the Cold War heating up, the Russians appear to be the obvious villains. The truth, as Woods suggests, none too subtly, is more complicated: The U.S. establishment is not just blacklisting artists, but, through violence and/or bribery, censoring any cultural reference that does not glorify American capitalism.
A sinister message that may not be all that far-fetched.Pub Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-385-54783-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
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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