Fast, fluent, and enjoyable—but unconcerned with evoking the lived experiences of the characters.
A sequel to E.M. Forster’s posthumous novel, Maurice.
Set circa 1912, written in 1912-13, and published posthumously in 1971, Maurice tells the story of a young man of the English upper-class who struggles to understand, then accept, then find love in a society in which homosexuality is a crime. Working with the same characters, di Canzio’s debut revises certain blind spots in Forster’s original—especially as they relate to Alec, Maurice’s lover. In Maurice, Alec is less of an independently realized character than an apotheosis, the final embodiment of Maurice’s long search for requited love. Enter di Canzio. He inverts the classist structure of Maurice by giving Alec a prolonged backstory and then retelling the story of Alec and Maurice’s courtship from Alec’s perspective, going so far as to reproduce verbatim much of Forster’s dialogue. But di Canzio doesn’t stop there. He further amends the Maurice-Alec tale by extending the timeline, something that Forster, who tried to turn the two men into happy woodcutters, abandoned when it became clear that no young men, regardless of their sexual preferences, could be happy together in the English countryside during World War 1. Picking up where Forster left off, di Canzio takes us to the Somme (with Alec) and Gallipoli (with Maurice), yanking the characters forward into the turbulence that Forster spared them. Will the lovers survive? Will they remain capable of love after witnessing such senseless violence? Will the green future Forster wanted for them still exist after the war? Though groundbreaking in its time for its positive portrayal of same-sex love, Maurice is inhibited by its highly visible agenda: The author’s intention for the book (that Maurice, a gay man, finds true love) is telegraphed from the first pages to the last, and every detail is in cold service to this goal. Unfortunately, though his prose is enjoyable and his book’s relationship to Forster’s original will bring real delight to readers who read the two back to back, di Canzio’s novel suffers from a similar failing. As Alec confidently diagnoses the inequities of his day, he begins to feel outside his own time period, the emanation of an author more interested in serving neat denunciations of Alec’s historical moment than in investigating whatever interior muddle that moment might stir up in Alec’s character. This may not bother some readers. But for those looking to feel embedded in the period, di Canzio will disappoint.
Fast, fluent, and enjoyable—but unconcerned with evoking the lived experiences of the characters.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-10260-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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BOOK REVIEW
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SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
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