Elegant and elegiac.
An artful novel in stories from the author of A Short History of Women (2009) and Our Kind (2004).
Marie and Simone survived World War II in France and came to New York with American husbands. Elizabeth, Marie’s tenant, is the mother of an adolescent son. The other voices shaping the novel include Margaret, the interim head of the school Elizabeth’s son attends, and Helen, a fellow student in the painting class Simone and Marie take together. There are men’s voices, too—the painting instructor, a policeman, Marie’s son—but their stories figure only to the extent that their lives intersect with those of Walbert’s female protagonists. That this is a novel concerned with the thoughts and experiences of women of a certain age is, all by itself, worthy of note. But Walbert does more here than simply appeal to a demographic that is seldom represented in fiction. She situates the lives of her characters within the context of a changing New York and a changing world, and she also takes some stylistic risks with her storytelling. Marie’s house is in Chelsea, but it’s clear that the neighborhood she settled in as a young bride is just barely connected to the neighborhood Elizabeth navigates. Marie’s home is a time capsule of another New York; the black-and-white TV set with rabbit ears is just about the only thing that separates it from the Gilded Age. Elizabeth, on the other hand, is struggling to negotiate the expectations set by other parents at her son’s progressive—and aggressively 21st-century—school. Throughout, Walbert uses footnotes to move between inner and outer, past and present. This technique is especially effective in depicting Marie’s childhood, a subject that she doesn’t willingly discuss. And all of this is suffused with a mournful air occasioned by climate change. Strange storms haunt this novel, as does the fear that New York—the city now, the city’s history—will soon be underwater.
Elegant and elegiac.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9932-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
PROFILES
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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