A Drue Heinz winner for her stories (Have You Seen Me?, 1991), Graver offers a debut novel about a 19th-century New Hampshire farm girl who goes off to the fabric mills of Lowell, Mass., finds herself pregnant and abandoned † la Tess Durbeyfield, then returns home to live a life of remorse and penance ever after. When her first child was born in 1829, Aimee's mother picked the baby's name from a magazine called The Ladies' Pearl. And with the name came early beauty, a quick mind, very stubborn disposition, and extraordinarily passionate temperament. By the time Aimee, at 15, implores her parents to let her go off to the mills, she's already come close to bursting with her new sexuality, has lusted after an itinerant mill-agent, and, in the hayloft, has had an innocent enough—to modern eyes and ears—sexual experience with her tubercular brother Jeremiah that like a memory of sin will stay with her (not altogether convincingly) all her life. Jeremiah's death soon after brings an inconsolable sense of loss to Aimee that's more than compounded when she delivers twins who are whisked off at once to waiting foster parents, never to be seen again. The author, luckily, paints this melodrama on a cloth made sturdily from the actual detail and texture of real 19th-century life, both at the mills and down on the farm—where Aimee, as scandalous to the town as a Hester Prynn (albeit without her Pearl), nurses her grief in a 12-by-12-foot bogside cabin on the edge of her parents' land. There, the years will pass; eremite Aimee's only two friends, each also crippled in one way or another, will become her symbolic husband and child; and the novel—trudging increasingly as it nears its close—will mete out the healing years. A familiar old tale told by an author who doesn't make it new, but much of the time makes it lovely, vivid, and touching. (Quality Paperback Book Club selection; $50,000 ad/promo)
Pub Date: Aug. 14, 1997
ISBN: 0-7868-6281-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
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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