Bayard turns the Wilde family’s tragedy into an engrossing, eternally relevant fable of fame, scandal, and love.
Bayard’s fictional vision of the Oscar Wilde scandal in 1890s England focuses on what the playwright’s choices, successes, and scandals cost innocent bystanders—particularly his family.
Fittingly, this bittersweet tragicomedy full of bad manners is structured like a Wilde play. The long first act, set on a Norfolk farm rented by the Wildes during the summer of 1892—three years before Oscar’s infamous court cases—focuses on Constance Wilde’s discovery of Oscar’s physical relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas. Both Wildes skirt around what they know is happening with verbal wit, their spiritual intimacy and mutual affection as obvious as Oscar’s self-destructive passion for the charming narcissist, eternally boyish Alfred. Despite Oscar’s entreaties, the deeply hurt Constance departs Norfolk without him although the marriage limps along (a situation reminiscent of the Kennedy marriage in Bayard’s Jackie & Me, 2022). The novel is concerned less with the historical facts of what happened next—Oscar’s failed libel suit against Alfred’s father and resulting incarceration for sodomy—than with the human fallout. The following acts concern Constance’s short, unhappy life after moving abroad to hide herself and her children from the ugly publicity, and then how each of the Wildes’ two sons, so intensely beloved in early childhood by both parents, ends up psychologically damaged in adulthood. Sexuality matters less in this telling than broader issues of sexual ethics, loyalty, and conformity. Oscar’s sexual orientation is less important than his selfishness, pride, weakness, and capacity for abiding love. As she grapples with her own sexual yearnings and sense of self-worth, Constance, an intellectual and supporter of women’s rights, is upset by Oscar’s loss of desire for her—their marriage began with mutual physical attraction—as much as by whom he desires instead. The truth is heartbreaking, but Bayard’s fifth act offers an implausible but satisfying solution Wilde himself might have written to send the audience home smiling.
Bayard turns the Wilde family’s tragedy into an engrossing, eternally relevant fable of fame, scandal, and love.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781643755304
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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