A well-meaning parable that hews too closely to its moral.
A Tasmanian family grapples with death, extinction, and vanishing limbs.
Anna, Terzo, and Tommy Foley have a problem: Their 86-year-old mother, Francie, is dying, and they have to decide whether to let her. This choice pits Anna and Terzo—the “successful” siblings who, having left Tasmania to pursue joyless careers, now feel guilty for having neglected their mother—against Tommy, “a failed artist” who still lives in the Hobart area. Confusing a material existence for a meaningful one, Anna and Terzo demand life-prolonging intervention after life-prolonging intervention. Francie has surgery. She goes on dialysis. She is intubated. Time passes. Francie dwindles and suffers but, in a sense, lives. Meanwhile, Australia is burning, birds are dying, and parts of Anna’s body are vanishing. Literally. First her finger. Then her kneecap. Then another finger. Then her whole hand. Gone. “Like the thylacine and the Walkman. Like long sentences. Like smoke-free summers. Gone, never to return.” Yet what does Anna do about it? She reaches for her phone and “stare[s] solemnly at her screen,” taking a perverse comfort from the dead firefighters and charred songbirds of the Anthropocene extinction. Flanagan’s latest is haunted by a central feature of our modern epoch: human denial in the face of social and environmental cataclysm. Yet though Flanagan is justified in his outrage—the natural world is literally disappearing in front of our glazed eyes—he fails to embed his outrage in a convincingly articulated story. With every scene, every character, and every sentence deployed in unabashed support of the book’s themes, the novel lacks the narrative verisimilitude it needs to transcend the realm of polemic—a problem exacerbated by Flanagan’s summary-heavy style, his refusal to explore any setting, person, or idea with adequate depth or complexity. The disappearance of Anna’s body parts, for instance, is barely integrated into the story: She is rarely debilitated by her missing limbs, and the entire phenomenon reads like an overearnest symbol, an errant plot arc that the author, grasping for Gogol-ian profundity, pasted in and forgot to flesh out. Heartfelt though his work is, beautiful though his sentences are, Flanagan has given us an early draft—a fleshy sketch of a denser, better book.
A well-meaning parable that hews too closely to its moral.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-31960-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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 dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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