This fuzzy outline for a period melodrama is likely to disappoint admirers of Rayfiel’s Eve trilogy.
Skeletons rattle in the closet, while an ancient aristocrat struggles to understand a new generation.
William, the 86-year-old Seventh Earl of Upton, is in poor health. His grandson Seabold, a recent arrival at Upton Hall in the English countryside, has suggested writing a diary as good therapy, so this wisp of a novel is in diary format. The old Victorian fears his impecunious grandson, his last surviving relative, is a parasite, and his suspicions are deepened when Seabold invites two girls, daughters of a tenant farmer, to stay at the Hall. As he tries to deal with the problem, William is bombarded by lurid memories. His sister Angela was deflowered by their father before the old boy went mad and had to be shackled. The madness was hereditary. To prevent it passing to William, his mother shopped around for another father; his sire was one of three servants, meaning the Earl is a bastard. Rayfiel’s fifth novel displays the same Gothic excess as his first (Split-Levels, 1994), but not in any detail—these are shards of memory. And there are scarcely any memories at all of his much younger wife Alice or his daughter Miranda, who died giving birth to Seabold. Meanwhile, there are eye-popping revelations in the present. Seabold’s lover is not pretty Kate, the farmer’s daughter, but strapping Lucas Dalrymple, a fellow aristocrat from their Oxford days who William, too clever by half, has inadvertently brought to the Hall. (He had his own same-sex experience when, as a nine-year-old, he was seduced by Angela’s suitor Lord Albemarle.) It’s a mess, but one William will not sort out, for his health is failing rapidly and his thoughts are turning to the nightshade that Cook has ready for him. She will perform the mercy killing he denied his own mother.
This fuzzy outline for a period melodrama is likely to disappoint admirers of Rayfiel’s Eve trilogy.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-57962-201-5
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
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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