Martin parses personal and social politics with methodical care and a reserved tone reminiscent of Edith Wharton.
Yes, the narrator of Martin’s new novel is a middle-aged American woman vacationing in Tuscany, but this prickly, uncomfortably relevant dive into personal and societal ethics is no escapist romance.
Creative writing professor Jan Vidor stays at Villa Chiara as a paying guest for the first time during the summer of 1983. The villa’s owner is Beatrice, herself a professor at an unnamed American college. Beatrice’s last name, Doyle, comes from her failed marriage to a Cape Cod oysterman’s son she met while attending graduate school at Boston College, but she was born into a family of aristocrats who split their time between Florence and their country estate, Villa Chiara. During more visits together over the next 20 years, Beatrice shares tales with Jan, connecting family history to 20th-century Italian history, particularly the Fascist era. Jan sees the family’s central tragedy as the death of Uncle Sandro, a gentle romantic who spent much of his adult life in an insane asylum but died violently under murky circumstances outside the villa in 1943. Believing Beatrice has given her permission to use the family stories, Jan writes them into a book; chapters become a novel within the novel here. Jan’s narrative pits innocence (spiritual, idealistic Sandro) against evil (his Fascist, capitalistic, misogynistic brother Marco). Yet the changes she witnesses at the villa and in Beatrice over time reveal harsh realities about class and capitalism in Italy (and America). Beatrice, the novel’s true central enigma, originally went to America to reinvent herself through education. She married but never took her working-class ex-husband seriously and continues to have problematic relationships with her mother and her son, who paradoxically has chosen to live in Germany. Yet after spending most of her life in America, Beatrice remains an outsider there while her identity as Italian landed gentry seems to crystallize as the working-class locals her family has patronized for generations take financial control.
Martin parses personal and social politics with methodical care and a reserved tone reminiscent of Edith Wharton.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54639-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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 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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