Nevertheless, a vividly imagined story that keeps nagging away at the corners of your mind. The Looking Glass is well worth...
With wry wit and understated compassion, French-British author Roberts (Impossible Saints, 1998, etc.) studies the ironies of loving—and of truly knowing the hearts and minds of those whom one loves.
Roberts’s flavorful new novel consists of two stories related sequentially, though otherwise more or less discrete. The first is orphaned Geneviève Délange’s narrative of her early years in a home run by stern, unloving nuns, the refuge she found in hearing and thereafter inventing stories (the most formative of them is a fable about a mermaid attempting to live outside her element), and her brief happiness in the employ of an indulgent mistress—until the latter’s coarse new husband compromises the servant girl, and Geneviève is sent packing. Thereafter, the novel is divided into several first-person narratives, juxtaposing Geneviève’s account of her new life in the home of amorous bachelor poet Gérard Colbert, with the stories told about him by Gérard’s domineering mother, his young niece Marie-Louise, her English governess Millicent, and Gérard’s out-of-town married mistress Isabelle. All these women are to one degree or another infatuated, if not deeply involved with, the taciturn (though, one presumes, smoldering) Master of the House—and Roberts’s tricky structure suggests a series of mirrors in which these females observe themselves falling under his spell. Comparisons to Jane Eyre are doubtless inevitable, though the Gothic momentum that animates Bronte’s romantic masterpiece is largely missing here, because Roberts seems determined to give each of her women sufficient space in which to reveal the secrets of her heart. This jars against the reader’s compelling interest in Geneviève, whose complex relationships with all the Colberts and rueful sense of her own lowly place (“Sooner or later the mermaid had to return to the sea, which was her only true home”) ought, one feels, to have received higher narrative and thematic priority.
Nevertheless, a vividly imagined story that keeps nagging away at the corners of your mind. The Looking Glass is well worth peering into.Pub Date: July 11, 2001
ISBN: 0-8050-6700-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
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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