Even if Kultgen intends this as satire, it’s hard to believe anyone can develop an interest in such a narcissistic,...
The narrator from Kultgen’s earlier novel (The Average American Male, 2007) is back—if anyone is interested.
Kultgen’s title makes it clear that his narrator is now married. His wife is the long-suffering Alyna, and they also have the requisite two kids, Andy and Jane. But how anyone could marry this self-centered, sexually-obsessed and irresponsible slimeball strains our credulity. Our family man is working a dead-end job doing not much of anything. His marriage is dull, his children are boring, and his main concern is that he’s not getting any. Alyna is also concerned about their marriage’s monotony, and they try some marriage counseling, but it doesn’t take. Things take a turn for the better (from the narrator’s point of view) when he hires lubricious 21-year-old Holly as an intern, and it’s clear these two are eventually going to mate like otters. Holly has gotten her sex education from Internet porn, something our Average American Male knows quite well. She’s also well-versed in how the modern woman uses social media, so when she sends compromising photographs that the AAM receives on his cellphone, he’s both delighted and turned on...until Alyna discovers the photos and kicks him out. For a while, he lives in a hotel room and visits Holly in her dorm room, barely finding his way through the haze of marijuana smoke. Eventually (and predictably), she also begins to find the narrator tiresome, and he tries to reconcile with Alyna, who has hired a self-described “shark” as a divorce lawyer.
Even if Kultgen intends this as satire, it’s hard to believe anyone can develop an interest in such a narcissistic, unsympathetic and downright odious narrator—one who makes Shallow Hal look like Heathcliff.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-211955-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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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