A domestic comedy that explodes the myths of manhood with joyful pandemonium.
Dunthorne (Wild Abandon, 2012, etc.) forsakes his erstwhile examinations of the adolescent mind to tackle one man’s full-on fear of adulthood.
It all starts at a party, as tales of a common lad’s downfall so often do. Our narrator for this story of rapid decline is Ray Morris, a London man who is 33 years old and married to a very pregnant wife, Garthene, a dedicated but tired hospital nurse. There is a flirtation at this party between Ray and his mate Lee’s wife, Marie, and a retaliatory punch that sends Ray reeling into a crisis of faith. “No surprise that those few seconds between the first punch and the second have come to stand in for probably three months of my thirties,” Ray tells us. “That I had never been punched in the face before seemed faintly ridiculous. How could I claim full maturity without ever having jumped through that life hoop?” What follows is a broadly sketched comedy of errors, all leading to a pitiful but all-too-common resolution for Ray, largely based on his answer to Garthene’s question, when, after the party, he shows up at the hospital where she's on duty, as to how drunk he is: “Very,” he confesses. “And making terrible decisions.” There's a frantic desperation to Ray's everyday life, even aside from his present troubles—he's a man who, while he will soon be a father, struggles to piece together a living as a tech journalist and fumes at the cash buyers who keep undercutting his desire to purchase an apartment. But Dunthorne also masterfully ratchets up Ray’s escalating troubles, culminating with an arrest (following a riot) for aggravated trespass (breaking into a landlord’s office) and receiving stolen goods (taking the proffered beer from a cheerful looter). Plus, Ray’s smiling appearance on a CCTV camera (“Happy Tragedy Man” reads the headline) earns him a firing and ruthless trolling by the public. Will things turn out fine for our hero? Probably not, as happens so often.
A domestic comedy that explodes the myths of manhood with joyful pandemonium.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-941040-87-4
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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