A readable but frustrating critique of contemporary politics that lacks bite.
Over the course of a week, an Indian American professor’s life spirals out of control.
University lecturer Raj Bhatt loves the exclusive Tennis Club, TC for short, to which he and his family belong even though he has always felt uncomfortable as one of its few nonwhite members. When, in an effort to connect with a black couple who want to join the club, he lets slip a slur in front of the membership committee, the other members of the TC are horrified. Raj feels awful, but he can't help wondering why the racial slights he’s faced during his time there haven’t received the same attention. Meanwhile, after students in his anthropology class send video of him supposedly criticizing Christianity and the West to a right-wing website, he finds himself in the middle of an internet firestorm that threatens his job. Suddenly, he's being labeled a racist and a reverse-racist simultaneously. This first novel from Pandya (The Blind Writer, 2015) aims to skewer both the upper-crust milieu of exclusive country clubs and conservative campus culture, and it partially succeeds. Pandya is sharply critical of right-wing “news” sites and conservative students who argue against any critique of the West, but his depiction of these phenomena is not totally believable. Pandya focuses on website comments, not social media or Reddit (the hubs of online hate today), and Raj’s outraged students feel more like convenient obstacles than real people. Also, while he captures the details of the country-club setting, he doesn't examine the politics of those characters as closely. The novel’s satirical edge might have been more effective if Raj were either more sympathetic or more odious. The novel ultimately sides with him, but he causes many of his problems himself and is irritating enough that it's hard to feel too sorry for him.
A readable but frustrating critique of contemporary politics that lacks bite.Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-358-37992-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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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