The labors of love take on new meaning here, but despite the hypnotic quality of the prose, too many shadows fall across the...
Starting with a grisly murder scene, Myerson’s fourth novel (after Me and the Fat Man, 1999, etc.) probes murky waters in Victorian London, as a woman crippled and in love trades in her surgeon husband for a married laborer.
Laura Blundy does the dark deed, bludgeoning her carrot-topped spouse Ewan, first with a piece of sculpture, then with her crutch, and finally by poking a poker into his brain—all because he reacts negatively when she says she’s leaving him. There’s more to her reaction than meets the eye, of course: her middle-class childhood having ended when her father died and she was thrown into the streets, Laura embraced that urban underworld willingly. She bore a son after being raped, but gave him to an orphanage rather than keep him with her in the workhouse, only to be told a few years later that he’d died. Despondent, jailed on suspicion of having murdered another child, she saw her life going nowhere—and then a taxi carriage ran over her leg. Enter Ewan, the hospital surgeon who first tries to save her limb, then has to amputate it, all the while falling desperately in love with his paradox of a patient, the lovely woman who embodies good breeding and coarse carnality. Laura marries him, but theirs is a fitful passion, overseen by Ewan’s crone of a mother who lives with them. He wants children, Laura doesn’t. When Laura throws herself into the Thames to escape Ewan’s demands, she’s pulled out by Billy, a worker helping build the London sewer—and a new love is born. It’s a haunting union that neither can explain at first but both ardently desire; as its dreamlike nature unfolds, Laura must make room for Billy, then must persuade her lover to run away with her, leaving his own family behind.
The labors of love take on new meaning here, but despite the hypnotic quality of the prose, too many shadows fall across the heart of Laura Blundy, concealing more than they reveal.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-57322-168-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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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