Toperoff locates the private passions in an intense, public and ultimately tragic love story without indulging in glitz or...
A canny exploration of the long affair between writers Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) and Lillian Hellman (1905-1984), which endured alcoholism, war and McCarthyism.
Toperoff’s earlier novels strived to drill into the psyches of Marilyn Monroe (Queen of Desire, 1992) and James Dean (Jimmy Dean Prepares, 1997), and the lives of Hammett and Hellman give him similarly rich fodder. When they met, Hammett had left behind family to pursue a career as a screenwriter, and Hellman was a rising playwright in a perfunctory marriage. The early chapters stumble as Toperoff strains to establish their individual backgrounds and voices, as if the novel will be an awkward oral history, but the tone soon settles, and the focus turns squarely on their affection for each other. The two were on different career trajectories when they met: Hammett’s best work, like The Maltese Falcon, was behind him, while Hellman would gain celebrity with her 1934 play The Children’s Hour. And they were separated often, as Hellman covered the Spanish Civil War and Hammett drank heavily and tinkered with scripts. Yet the two completed each other both romantically and editorially, and Toperoff captures the writers' interior anxieties well, as Hammett struggled with stark minimalist autobiographical sketches and Hellman absorbed brickbats from her critics. (Some of the book's sweetest scenes feature their back and forths over their latest writing projects.) The need to become each other’s cheerleader becomes more pronounced in the later chapters, as the House Un-American Activities Committee comes after both of them; Hellman’s petty harassment at the hands of U.S. and British authorities, and the ballooning sense of injustice that ensues, is particularly well-turned. Toperoff credits numerous biographies and collected letters, but the novel never feels like a studiously researched museum piece.
Toperoff locates the private passions in an intense, public and ultimately tragic love story without indulging in glitz or melodrama.Pub Date: July 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59051-568-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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