This odd book stands to anger Lucille Ball’s fans and bemuse Darin Strauss’.
A fictionalized version of Lucille Ball’s life, including a love affair with the author’s grandfather.
For decades, Strauss, the author of the award-winning memoir Half a Life (2010) as well as novels including Chang and Eng (2000), has been obsessed with the fact that his grandfather Isidore Strauss might have met Lucille Ball at a 1949 party thrown by Donald Trump’s father to celebrate the destruction of the Pavilion of Fun on Coney Island. The complicated concoction of memoir and fiction that has emerged from this spark of inspiration interweaves imagined scenes from Ball’s life on and off the set with imagined scenes from his grandfather’s. Between these chapters, he slips in vignettes of what seems to be memoir, documenting his earlier attempts to bring attention to this passion project. The novel begins at Trump’s party, written up in a highly stylized, flashy prose style: “Hey, that’s your favorite celebrity over there. On the boardwalk, her white shoes scuffed black with sand. (If she’s not famous now, just wait.) She’s striding—confidenting—right into this party.” Before the night’s over, Desi Arnaz will have punched Isidore Strauss in the eye. What follows incorporates impressive research into the progress of Ball’s career—the author hopes to “remind people that Lucille Ball starred in America’s first big-time interracial love story; was the first powerful woman in Hollywood; that she owned more movie sets at one point than did any movie studio.” However, in addition to grafting his made-up story onto the facts of Ball’s life, he admits to monkeying with other details, which undercuts even the informational aims of the book. Mingling fictional characters with famous historical ones worked to brilliant effect in E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime and many similar novels since, but this feels more like a thought experiment than a compelling story. The jaunty narrator is not just omniscient, but presumptuous and intrusive, spending a good deal of time in the characters’ heads, confidently reporting their thoughts. In a scene in which Ball is having sexual intercourse with the author’s grandfather, Strauss has her meditate on why she likes him so much. “Really, it was the fucking. It’s hard not to love something you’re really good at. She was really good at that.” Oof.
This odd book stands to anger Lucille Ball’s fans and bemuse Darin Strauss’.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9276-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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