Luther alone is worth the price of admission, but there’s much more to like in Gaffney’s rip-roaring, agreeably ungainly,...
Dark criminous deeds abound in Paris Review editor Gaffney’s colorful debut, a melodrama set in the late 1860s in New York City’s notorious Five Points.
The story’s vivid actions exfoliate from the suspicious fire that ravages P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, making German immigrant stableman Georg Geiermeir a hunted man. Briefly detained in the Tombs and then released, Geirmeir attracts the attention of Irish immigrant “hot-corn girl” and pickpocket Beatrice O’Gamhna, a member of the female branch of the Points’ dangerous criminal gang, the Whyos. When the murdered body of a pregnant girl is discovered in the wreckage of the Barnum fire, Geirmeir finds both refuge and further peril among the Whyos (who rename him “Frank Harris”), having been recruited by their charismatic bisexual leader, “Dandy Johnny” Dolan, the figurehead behind whom looms the real criminal mastermind: black-hearted Mother Meg Dolan. Gaffney’s busy plot—much lavish detail is drawn from Herbert Asbury’s classic social study Gangs of New York (also the inspiration for Martin Scorsese’s eponymous feature film)—encompasses the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the heroic efforts of the pioneers of women’s medicine to rescue impoverished girls from prostitution, disease, and premature death. Gaffney’s first outing isn’t as wonderful as it might have been: some of its action is quite redundant, the seams of her formidable research clearly show, and her Trollopian habit of inserting loquacious authorial commentary at odd moments often unsettles the tone. But the narrative line is strong, and the text is enlivened by such brilliantly imagined characters as the aforementioned Dolans, the conflicted Geirmeir (haunted by memories of the family he left behind in Germany), and the Bill Sykes of this consciously Dickensian novel: freelance informer, murderer, and Geirmeir’s implacable nemesis, the vile “Undertaker,” Luther Undertoe.
Luther alone is worth the price of admission, but there’s much more to like in Gaffney’s rip-roaring, agreeably ungainly, outrageously entertaining tale.Pub Date: March 8, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-6150-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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 phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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