This pallid historical novel explores Dolley Madison's tenure as first lady, focusing in particular on the year 1814 and conflict with the British. Brown (Venus Envy, 1993, etc.) brings little of her characteristic humor to the tale, making Madison a virtuous bore. Third-person accounts of dinner parties and cabinet meetings are interspersed with selections from Madison's fictional diary, but it all seems geared more to relating historical facts than to entertaining. While a list of characters and short descriptions of their roles precedes the text, Brown finds it necessary to explicate further whenever anyone is introduced, and there are endless passages about Madison's insight into politics and her amazing social skills. Her love for her husband is true and steady, adding little spice to the story; even when certain newspapers accuse the first lady of sleeping around, her husband never doubts her. Madison's involvement in the lives of her slaves is interesting but handled too primly. Sukey, Madison's personal servant, is promiscuous and rebellious (claiming that she will never marry, she says, ``I'm not being the slave of a slave''), but the other people toiling under her command are faithful and adoring. One even insists that were he to be freed, he would remain with her. Some of Madison's recollections about her Quaker upbringing and her growing obsession with shooting craps are intriguing, but they are rarely integral to the proceedings. For those interested in the gossipy side of history there are tidbits like the rumor that John Randolph may have had shrunken genitals or that Louis Serurier, minister from France, and his wife, Lisel, had ``a European marriage at its best,'' meaning that they were free to have affairs. Ultimately, however, nothing much happens in Madison's life. A war rages, but there is little forward motion in her retelling of daily events. Unusually prudish work sabotaged by the author's admiration for her subject. (Literary Guild alternate selection)
Pub Date: May 20, 1994
ISBN: 0-553-08890-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
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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