Can you top this? is the question posed by each chapter of this upmarket soap opera, and the answer is always yes.
Five narrators play a game of narrative hot potato with a tale of summer sexcapades.
Rachel Klein is a student at "that overrated liberal arts school on the Hudson." As the novel opens, she offers to dogsit for her creative writing professor, Zahid Azzam—"the name of either a superhero or terrorist"—while he goes home to Pakistan. Then they have sex. Meanwhile, up in glorious bougie Connecticut, Rachel's father, Jonathan, has left her mother, Becca, and Becca's beloved poodle has died. So when Rachel shows up for the summer with a nearly identical poodle and in a few weeks the dog is followed by its owner, the supersexy, famous Pakistani writer—well, Becca is in a vulnerable position to say the least. Dermansky (The Red Car, 2016, etc.) gives each of the Kleins and Zahid a turn at being the narrator and throws in one more—a lesbian financial analyst named Khloe who is subletting Zahid’s apartment in Brooklyn. Khloe's interior monologue contains lines like these: "Honestly, this kind of shit did not happen to me. I was tall and biracial and sexy." Khloe's twin sister is a writer named Kristi who has stolen Khloe's childhood secrets for her own award-winning first novel, nominated of course by Zahid. Now maybe Kristi can help him get a job at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she teaches, prying him out of his very long lost weekend in Connecticut. There are many funny writer jokes in this book, among them the commentary on Rachel's parents' marriage provided by her short stories; in a way the whole book is a writer joke. All the characters sound the same—like Dermansky, except with more or less profanity—and that seems to be intentional. "We appreciate short sentences," says Rachel's mom, speaking for all of them, really. Dermansky has won herself a cadre of devoted fans, especially among other writers. This may not be the best thing she's ever written—it doesn't have the sneaky profundity of The Red Car—but it's a hell of a lot of stylish fun.
Can you top this? is the question posed by each chapter of this upmarket soap opera, and the answer is always yes.Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-65563-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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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