Although the pace lags in sections—notably a cross-country train tour which seems to occur in real time—all in all this is a...
Aging Japanese actor, a former silent-screen sex symbol, is offered a second chance at notoriety.
Revoyr’s third novel (Southland, 2003, etc.) is loosely based on a scandal of Hollywood’s silent era. It’s 1964, and Jun Nakayama, 73, is content to dwell in prosperous obscurity, monitoring his real-estate investments and hiking the Hollywood Hills. But troubling memories of his days as a controversial movie star resurface when journalist Nick Bellinger interviews Jun about his flaming youth and leading ladies, including siren Elizabeth Banks and Nora Niles, an ingénue dominated by a harridan of a stage mother. This being Los Angeles, Nick is shopping a screenplay with a star turn for Jun—as an elderly Japanese man who is mistaken for a former war criminal by his rural California neighbors. Although excited by the prospect of working again, Jun is loath to revisit the circumstances that prematurely curtailed his career in 1922. Seamlessly interwoven flashbacks detail Jun’s ascension to stardom despite anti-Japanese prejudice. Jun’s excitement almost overwhelms a nagging suspicion that a comeback might engender a deeper inquiry into Jun’s role in one of early Hollywood’s most lurid unsolved mysteries. Ashley Tyler, a British director, was found murdered in his bungalow. There are three suspects: Elizabeth and Nora, who each had romantic designs on Ashley, and Jun, Ashley’s rival for Elizabeth. All three are cleared, but Elizabeth drinks herself to death and Nora is forever consigned to her mother’s less than tender mercies. But the murder isn’t the only reason Jun is publicity shy. He harbors a guilty secret, which the hoopla surrounding a movie release will expose. Allowing a first-person narrator to withhold the truth until the climactic moment is a neat trick, one handily accomplished mostly through Jun’s convincing voice, which Revoyr conveys in lucid, precise and period-appropriate prose.
Although the pace lags in sections—notably a cross-country train tour which seems to occur in real time—all in all this is a pulse-quickening, deliciously ironic serving of Hollywood noir.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-933354-46-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2008
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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