It is extraordinary that a story which carries such a weight of sorrow is never depressing, but Norman the master craftsman...
Norman (best known for The Bird Artist, 1994) scores again with this gripping account of a family ripped apart by obsession and murder.
In format, the novel is a long letter written by Wyatt Hillyer to Marlais, the daughter he scarcely knows, to explain the “terrible incident” that has kept them apart. But Wyatt must start with something equally terrible. In 1941, when he was 17, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, his parents jumped to their deaths from separate bridges; they were unhappily in love with the same woman. Wyatt leaves Halifax to live with his Uncle Donald, Aunt Constance and adopted daughter Tilda in their small town, and becomes apprenticed to his sled-making uncle. The hoped-for sanctuary is anything but. Wyatt has exchanged his parents’ erotic obsession for his uncle’s obsession with German U-boats swarming beneath the Atlantic; on top of that, he is now an unhappy lover himself, yearning for Tilda. It is his rotten luck that Tilda should have fallen for Hans Mohring, a German philology student. Wyatt accepts his fate as the rejected suitor—no histrionics for him. Meanwhile the news that Constance, on a ferry, is among the latest U-boat victims, catapults Donald into madness. He murders Hans (already married to Tilda) and has Wyatt help him dump the body in the ocean. Donald confesses and gets life; Wyatt, morally innocent but legally culpable, draws a short sentence. After his release, he makes love to the bereft Tilda, just once. In time Tilda will move with their baby Marlais to Denmark, home to Hans’s parents; now, in 1967, Wyatt is making full disclosure to his grown daughter. Though himself a victim twice over, and still feeling the pain of his parents’ deaths, he has never complained. Norman has developed this brave, emotionally reticent man with great delicacy.
It is extraordinary that a story which carries such a weight of sorrow is never depressing, but Norman the master craftsman pulls it off.Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-618-73543-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
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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