Flares up but fizzles too soon.
A Peruvian maid upends a household in Gornick’s complex psychodrama.
For Myra, a psychoanalyst, order is the guiding principal of her life. The only child of austere, unloving parents, she has arranged her existence with exactitude. Although her cardiologist husband, Larry, long ago left her for an ever-younger succession of trophy wives, she is now content to live alone in her Manhattan brownstone, where she also sees patients and has recently taken up the piano. Her equilibrium is upset when a stranger—or strangers—comes to town. Her screenwriter son, Adam, his Moroccan wife, Rachida, a doctor, and their son, Omar, arrive from Detroit, and they will live with Myra while Rachida completes a residency. Myra’s daughter Caro, a preschool director with an eating disorder, is conflicted about her brother’s return. Until his marriage, Adam, who suffers from several phobias, was symbiotically dependent on his older sister. In need of domestic help, Myra hires Eva, recommended by a cousin in Peru. Eva, who comes from an abusive home (just how abusive will be a major plot determinant), is descended from Moroccan Jews, rubber traders who came to the Amazon and married native women. Although raised Catholic, Eva is seeking to reinforce her Jewish identity. Adam identifies with Eva’s quest, which jibes with one of his film obsessions, John Ford’s The Searchers. Secrets abound: Adam is also obsessed with gay porn magazines. Rachida is carrying on a lesbian affair with a colleague, and Caro still suffers the aftereffects of amorous adventures in Morocco (which led, indirectly, to her brother’s engagement). Emboldened by Myra’s professional empathy, Eva reveals that her father also loved porn, which prompted his molestation of Eva and led ultimately to her mother’s death. When Eva discovers Adam’s cache of smut, a catastrophe ensues that explodes the family’s carefully groomed complacency. But too many point-of-view characters, some in-your-face symbolism, and a soft-focus, partly redemptive ending dilute the impact of this psychologically authoritative second novel.
Flares up but fizzles too soon.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-27786-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
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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