Pastan (This Side of Married, 2004) is strong on domestic despair, but the story of the woman who lets a man take the credit...
A literary historian feels drawn to a 19th-century wife and mother who sacrificed all for her man.
A driven academic, Jane Levitsky loves her infant daughter Maisie and husband Billy, but most of her intellectual and emotional energy flows toward her research into the 19th-century Russian novelist Grigory Karkov and his wife Masha. Even during childbirth, Jane’s thoughts drift to Masha, whose diaries fascinate Jane as much as Karkov’s novels. Jane gets a prestigious assistant professorship at the University of Wisconsin, where the eminent Karkov scholar Otto Sigelman has just retired. Increasingly obsessed with her research and chafing at her domestic responsibilities, Jane hires a graduate student she is advising to be Maisie’s live-in babysitter. Meanwhile, Sigelman, who still comes regularly to his office next to Jane’s, disparages her emphasis on Masha’s importance as Karkov’s muse, but Jane begins to suspect Grigory may have lifted entire diary entries from his wife. On a trip to Chicago’s Newberry Library, Jane finds a tantalizing letter from Masha that may shed new light on her role in Karkov’s writing. But before Jane can thoroughly digest the letter, Billy calls to say Maisie is in the hospital. Jane must abort her trip, and by the time she gets back to Chicago, the letter has disappeared. Sigelman has stolen it. She steals it back. She also discovers that taken-for-granted Billy has slept with the babysitter. He moves out. She tracks down Karkov’s last descendent, who gives her a startling manuscript: Before her death, Masha wrote a novel Grigory claimed as his own with her blessing. Jane realizes her own life is out of balance. In an improbably happy ending, Jane reconciles with Billy, has a second child and begins her book on Masha.
Pastan (This Side of Married, 2004) is strong on domestic despair, but the story of the woman who lets a man take the credit for her artistic achievement never comes to life.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-15-101369-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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