Over-the-top fireworks.
This block-sized blockbuster can’t be faulted for timidity—and, as an entertaining fictional primer to mid-19th-century Western history, very nearly justifies its hubris.
The year 1848 is this epic’s most memorable character. Andersen (Turn of the Century, 1999, etc.) crams paragraphs with personality and incident, but he’s best at making the past palpable. A world-shaking annus mirabilis, 1848 saw California’s gold rush, widespread cholera and trans-European monarch-toppling. Dillydallying in Bohemian life, upscale Brit Benjamin Knowles hits Paris right when it explodes. A gamin happens to hand him a homemade bomb as gendarmes approach. Mistaken for a rebel, Ben flees, finding his best friend murdered in rioting and the fetching grenadier slain by an avenging reactionary. His adventures elaborately cross-cut with those of the siblings Lucking—fireman and Mexican war vet Duff and actress-hooker Polly—ablaze with lefty, demimonde fever in a Big Apple straight out of Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. Add Daguerreian-era tabloid journalist Timothy Skaggs to this posse of raffish visionaries—“Modernity glows,” Skaggs exults—and the pursuit of happiness, fresh starts and Manifest Destiny commences as they heed Greeley’s injunction: “Go West.” Just one of a cast of true-life cameos, Greeley joins wasted genius Edgar Allan Poe, compulsively farting Charles Darwin and ever-eager Walt Whitman in the book’s vast backstory. That backstory, teeming with slave trade and robber-baron anecdotes, gossip about Dickens and Thackeray and explanations of utopian socialist politics, steals thunder from the actual tale, as no protagonist is especially sympathetic and the plot proves dizzyingly frenetic. Basically, what makes this a thriller is the breathlessness of the historical moment itself.
Over-the-top fireworks.Pub Date: March 13, 2007
ISBN: 0-375-50473-7
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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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