A relentless black comedy, excellently phrased but formally frustrating.
For the suffering members of an English family crushed by its artist patriarch, a weekend of so-called celebration leads to implosion.
Ray Hanrahan is a monster, “a one-man chorus of contempt” whose withering criticism and ceaseless manipulation of his wife, Lucia, and younger daughter, Jess, have caused the first to self-sabotage and the second to flee London for a teaching career in Scotland. Originally her tutor, Ray used to nurture Lucia’s artistic gifts, but he has become so jealous of her success that she, drowning in loyalty, must dodge the limelight in order to keep the domestic peace. Ray and Lucia's other daughter—32-year-old Leah, who’s never had a boyfriend and still lives at home—has created a comparatively safe space by devoting her life to her father’s needs and wishes. Now the family is preparing for an important event: Ray’s first solo art show since the mid-1990s, which he hopes will rekindle his fading reputation. Meanwhile, stable things are shifting. Lucia is “stupid with lust” for a woman she met at a party, and her gallerist is trying to reach her with important news. Both Jess and Leah have secrets of their own, and so does Patrick, Lucia’s first child, Ray’s stepson and another lacerated victim of his heedless disdain. Mendelson stuffs every page of her three-day-long comic parable of dysfunction with a high pitch of discomfort, squirms, plots, and wounds while delineating her characters—especially the toweringly horrible yet compelling Ray—with a broad brush. The repetitive dilemmas and submission of those surrounding Ray will be a test of some readers’ patience, or perhaps a cause of sympathy if the characters are viewed as in thrall to their emotional abuser. The writing sparkles with perfectly judged perceptions, but by the novel’s conclusion its rigid structure and underlining can seem oppressive.
A relentless black comedy, excellently phrased but formally frustrating.Pub Date: July 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781250286932
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
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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