A working-class drama finds the grit beneath Portland's gentrification.
Need propels a heroine's long night of the soul.
Vlautin’s fiction is full of working-class strugglers doing their best to survive a rapidly changing country. Most of them, including the protagonists of his propulsive new novel, have been priced out of comfortable living, or even stability. And so they turn to unsavory means to get by. This book plays out like a modern noir take on a Tennessee Williams play, its desperate characters harboring old resentments, its hard-luck heroine settling scores throughout a long, bloody night in her hometown of Portland, Oregon. Thirty-year-old Lynette wants to buy the run-down rental house she shares with her embittered mother and her developmentally challenged brother. But she needs cash, especially after her mom’s most recent starburst of irresponsibility. She’s owed money around town, and it’s time to collect—and then some. Vlautin’s supporting characters—meth-heads and pimps, waitresses and mechanics—occupy a rung of society that rarely gets its story told in any kind of convincing way. His language is always vivid. Here’s Lynette studying a tweaker: “Bursting red blisters ran from the back of his neck, around his left ear, and completely engulfed his left eye and forehead. He was young, in his twenties, but his teeth had gone bad and his eyes looked pushed into his head like an old man’s.” Such is the company that Lynette comes to keep in her quest for an instant nest egg. Her nocturnal journey is gripping, but much of the book’s power derives from more quotidian questions: Can I get a loan to make that down payment on the house? Can I balance that introduction to econ class with my two jobs? Will my car start? And what happened to my city? “I’m realizing that the whole city is starting to haunt me,” Lynette tells a friend. “And all the new places, all the big new buildings, just remind me that I’m nothing, that I’m nobody.” Vlautin has written a soulful thriller for the age of soulless gentrification.
A working-class drama finds the grit beneath Portland's gentrification.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06303-508-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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BOOK REVIEW
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