A must for Jamesians, with a storyline sturdy enough to draw in the unconverted as well.
Hot on the heels of Colm Tóibín’s The Master (p. 297), another novel about Henry James’s later years.
Though Lodge (Thinks…, 2001, etc.) is best known for his satirical fiction, his tone here is generally serious, opening with James’s deathbed scene in 1915. Then a shift to the early 1880s finds the writer walking in London with his close friend, Punch illustrator George Du Maurier, while James is at his midcareer peak. Daisy Miller, Washington Square, and Portrait of a Lady have made him “the coming man of the literary novel. . . [while] his elegant, cosmopolitan essays appeared in the most prestigious reviews. Hostesses competed for his presence.” But as the narrative moves through the late ’80s and ’90s, sticking close to the facts but with convincing forays into the writer’s thoughts, we see more elaborate novels like The Princess Casamassina slightly diminishing James’ reputation, while an ill-advised five-year excursion into playwriting climaxes with the disastrous 1895 premiere of Guy Domville. James struggles not to feel jealous of Du Maurier’s huge success with the novel Trilby, but that’s hard for a man who has consciously dedicated his entire life to his art. The 1894 suicide of James’s other close friend, American popular novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, who may have been in love with him, leads James to fear that his obsession with the perfectly crafted sentence has dried up his heart. On the contrary, Lodge’s warmly sympathetic portrait quietly asserts, James’s grappling with envy and despair in this very human manner led to his final masterpieces, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. Though the pace here is almost as stately as in those late novels, the effect is powerfully emotional as the book closes with the writer’s last moments and an authorial interpolation by Lodge expressing his love for James the artist—and the man.
A must for Jamesians, with a storyline sturdy enough to draw in the unconverted as well.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03349-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
IN THE NEWS
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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