Briskly paced, but the slight characterizations rely on overdone stereotypes of the überclasses.
Superrich sybarites cope with secrets, “teenstrangers” and recalcitrant contractors.
Except for the relative wealth involved, the premise of Walker’s second novel will remind readers of her first (Four Wives, 2008): A quartet of wives comes together to plan an event. Rosalyn, spouse of affable billionaire Barlow, is gatekeeper to the suburban social nirvana known as Winchester, Conn. Rookie social climber Sara, who gave up investigative journalism for marriage to Wall Street wunderkind Nick, is secretly on the pill; she’s conflicted about having a second child. (Sara and Nick occupy a McMansion-in-progress, in thrall to a builder who is overbearing and way, way over budget.) Jacks fears, based on frequent forays into her husband David’s locked briefcase, that his hedge fund has gone bust after a disastrous Vegas hotel deal and that the Feds, and possibly Mafia loan sharks, are after him. Contentedly married Eva plays only a minor role as fixer and occasionally, for reasons that are never adequately explained, agent provocateur. (Aware of Jacks’ clandestine affair with Barlow, Eva engineers a coincidence that will redirect Rosalyn’s jealous suspicions to Sara.) The wives’ organizational juggernaut is deployed on behalf of Rosalyn’s 14-year-old daughter Caitlin, a freshman at tony Winchester Academy who was caught fellating the school’s hottie-in-chief, Kyle. Trying to save face, and battling demons from her own similar imbroglio decades before, Rosalyn spearheads a parents rally at which a prominent sexologist will warn that in the new teen mores relationships, commitment and responsibility are being replaced by the Friends with Benefits phenomenon. Caitlin, the “teenstranger” (her father’s exasperated term), is infatuated with Kyle, even as she senses she’s just a puppet in mean-girl Amanda’s preppy version of Dangerous Liaisons. An Internet chat room offers solace, but is Caitlin’s virtual friend just another manipulator?
Briskly paced, but the slight characterizations rely on overdone stereotypes of the überclasses.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-37816-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
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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