A crackling good epic, both comic and bawdy.
From Charyn (Raised by Wolves: The Turbulent Art and Times of Quentin Tarantino, 2006, etc.), a tale of intrigue, spying, George Washington, Benedict Arnold, Manhattan prostitutes, a castrato and a one-eye double agent—in other words, almost more history, character and action than can be contained in a single novel.
The eponymous narrator, John Stocking, grows up in and around a brothel in New York City and is both bewildered and curious about who his father is. He knows his mother is Gert, the fiery madam in charge of the “nuns” at the facility (located in a Red Light district called “Holy Ground”), but the mystery of his paternity remains for much of the story. (For a while he’s led to believe that George Washington is not just the father of his country.) The novel opens with John at the age of 17, seemingly in danger of being hanged, but Washington takes pity on him. Shortly afterward, John finds out that he was not actually in real danger, and from this point the novel becomes a picaresque adventure as the reader follows John’s tortuous path through the American Revolution. He falls in love with Clara, a ravishing enchantress who’s the most lusted-after woman in Gert’s stable. One of the most interesting aspects of the novel is its portrayal of George Washington, far removed from the thin-lipped, dour patriot whose image dominates our view of the Revolution. Here he is a larger than life (literally—he’s portrayed as a giant) and fully human character who’s as concerned with the goings-on at Gwen’s as he is with Valley Forge. Other historical personages flit through the book with varying degrees of intensity: George Washington’s secretary, the diminutive and guileful Alexander Hamilton; “Sir Billy” Howe, commander of the British army; his brother Admiral Lord Richard Howe (aka “Black Dick”); and most significantly, Benedict Arnold, either a hero or a patriot, depending on whose side you’re on.
A crackling good epic, both comic and bawdy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-393-06497-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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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