An admirably big-picture, multivalent family saga.
An affluent New York family is flung into a tailspin in 2009 in the third novel by Beha (Arts and Entertainments, 2014, etc.).
Beha is the editor of Harper’s, and this story evokes the spirit of two famous essays the magazine published championing the social novel: Tom Wolfe’s “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” and Jonathan Franzen’s “Why Bother?” Its young hero, Sam, has arrived from Wisconsin to write about the intersection of hard data and news for a storied publication. The job introduces him to the Doyle family, whose patriarch, Frank, is a longtime baseball writer and political pundit who recently disgraced himself making racist comments about Barack Obama on air at a Mets game. Doyle’s wife, Kit, is an investment banker pummeled by the Great Recession; their son, Eddie, is an Iraq War vet who’s overly enchanted with a street preacher, and their daughter, Margo, is making little progress on her dissertation on Wordsworth. The Doyles give Beha ample opportunity to expound on media, sports, religion, war, finance, and the arts; Justin, a Black hedge fund manager noblesse-obliged by the Doyles, is a pathway to riff on race while Sam’s wife, Lucy, lets him explore marriage. The novel can feel a tick too orderly, as Beha carefully maintains his large cast and big themes. But each character is engaging and full-blooded, and Beha pushes them hard: He’s concerned with how irrationality worms its way into everybody’s lives (via infidelity, faith, insider trading, plagiarism, addiction) and how that irrationality can undermine us and push us closer to understanding ourselves. “We hated nothing more than indisputable evidence, because we wanted to dispute,” Beha writes. And though the novel’s tone is more intellectual than what Wolfe and Franzen prescribed, its breadth, ambition, and command are refreshing.
An admirably big-picture, multivalent family saga.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-947793-82-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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