A workshoppy affair in which not much happens. Sewing buffs, however, may learn a thing or two.
Or, Coco Chanel goes to Kansas, and gets the heck out.
Nell Plat, the center of McGraw’s (Creative Writing/Ohio State Univ.; The Good Life, 2004, etc.) novel, is what Dorothy Gale might have become had she not scooted off in a cyclone: She has all the skills of a rural woman just out of the pioneer era, she knows just a little something about birthing babies, popping out a couple at the tender age of 17, and she’s bright as all get out. But little Nell has seen the great lights a-flickerin’ on the horizon, which gives her ma and pa reason to think she fancies herself a little too good for the prairie; after all, Nell whinnies, “I’m not after staying on the smallest ranch in Kansas. I’d like to see something fresh for a change,” a pretty decent clue as to her intentions. Nell makes good: Shaking off her loser husband, who can’t tell ryegrass seed from wheat, she hies herself off to Hollywood and sets up shop as couturier to the budding film industry, her garments soon to brush the knobby knees of Jazz Age starlets everywhere and bestow still more Itness on the It Girl, Miss Clara Bow. But that Kansas past—well, it just won’t leave our heroine alone, ryegrass and all. Essentially an oater with flappers, McGraw’s novel moves at a pace befitting hand-cranked movie cameras; modern readers may find it a tad too glacial for comfort. Apart from endless exposition, the author invests great energy into getting the idioms of the day right, too; thus the narrative is peppered with phrases such as, “Should the wearer be seized by the urge to do the Charleston, this dress will accommodate her” and “What do the sheiks and shebas back in Topeka think is the bee’s knees?” That attention to period detail would gladden the heart of a reader in the Jazz Age, but it’s just a little too much for one in our dimension.
A workshoppy affair in which not much happens. Sewing buffs, however, may learn a thing or two.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-618-38628-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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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