There have been many great satires of the domestic world (Fay Weldon comes to mind), but Frazier’s Cursing Mommy seems...
Nonfiction writer Frazier (Travels in Siberia, 2010, etc.) delivers his first novel, an uneven comedy of domestic disasters.
Inspired by his “Shouts & Murmurs” character from the New Yorker, the Cursing Mommy, in page-length doses, is hilarious. She skitters from one impossibly ruinous situation to the next, ending the day with a boozy balm under the covers. Her daily blog offers advice and meditation techniques for other harried ladies, though the Cursing Mommy, an odd pastiche of foulmouthed comic and Martha Stewart, ends most posts either furious or defeated by the treasures life flings her way. The question is whether Frazier can move his Mommy from the compact page to the full-length narrative. Alas, Cursing Mommy’s shtick grows old, and there is little plot to prop her up. Husband Larry is foundering at work, but Cursing Mommy might be able to smooth the problem with her questionable charm, as the Boss is besotted by her violent outbursts. Sons Kyle (who swoons and rashes up at school) and Trevor (heavily medicated to prevent either sociopathy or pranking) bring little joy to Cursing Mommy, as most of her weekends are spent “volunteering” for school building repairs or bringing Trevor to his therapist. She takes seriously the self-help advice of modern-day sage M. Foler Tuohy, a composer of opaque bons mots. But when the red-faced guru runs off with her best friend, she curses the day she got her book group to switch from anti-Bush biographies to Tuohy’s goofy inspirationals. There is some closure to the year’s travails, though one suspects the Cursing Mommy is simply cursed, unable to escape the Promethean-like tragedies of domestic life.
There have been many great satires of the domestic world (Fay Weldon comes to mind), but Frazier’s Cursing Mommy seems trapped within her own joke.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-374-13318-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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