Part page-turner and part aesthetic treatise, Rock’s (Spells, 2017, etc.) latest is, like the currents of the Great Lakes,...
“Part of my pleasure of swimming in open water, especially at night, is that it makes me afraid.”
In the summer of 1994, our unnamed narrator, a 26-year-old aspiring writer, meets Mrs. Abel, the mysterious young widow with whom he voyages by night through the swells and currents of Lake Michigan. To the narrator, and to the summer community on Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula, Mrs. Abel is an enigma: She’d been married to Mr. Abel, whose name she wears like a keepsake throughout the novel, for less than a month before his death, and the cabin that she’s inherited is so sparsely decorated that everything in it—her husband’s now-scentless clothes, a wooden bird carved by a friend, a painting by Charles E. Burchfield of a forest fire marching toward a cabin—seems to possess, in the narrator’s eyes, the significance of an artifact, of objects kept because they serve as mementos of missing people or missing times. By swimming together at night, Mrs. Abel and the narrator build a secret relationship out of their shared passion—but the relationship ends prematurely when one night near summer’s close the swimmers arrive upon a strange shoal far from shore and, while exploring it, Mrs. Abel somehow disappears. Twenty-ish years later, the narrator—now a successful novelist who lives with his wife and two daughters in Oregon—is reconstructing that summer, trying to get closer to who he was, and who Mrs. Abel was, and what happened that night on the water. To do so, he pours over the artifacts left behind by that time—photographs and artworks frequent the text, as do letters to and from his ex-girlfriend. He floats in a sensory deprivation tank, studying “the past, the future, [and] the hypothetical…hidden beneath the surface” of his thoughts. He consults Rilke, Burchfield, and Chekhov, among many others. And, most significantly, he writes—thus creating out of life’s artifacts a new artifact, this book, which serves as keepsake for both Mrs. Abel and the narrator’s youth, referring eyes back upon them across the years.
Part page-turner and part aesthetic treatise, Rock’s (Spells, 2017, etc.) latest is, like the currents of the Great Lakes, subtle and haunted, deeply complex and “quietly…sinister”; his readers, like his swimmers, ought to know “that the currents of the subsurface are likely to be moving.”Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64129-000-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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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