A surprising, vibrant final novel from a legendary Southern writer.
An unsupervised boy comes of age in 1940s Tennessee in Gay’s final posthumous novel.
Yates gives new meaning to the term hardscrabble childhood. One winter night, he wakes up to the sound of a wagon—“Sany Claus?” he thinks—but it’s just a man dropping off the corpse of Yates’ father, whom he was forced to shoot for stealing meat. “I aimed to fire over his head but he’s a purty tall feller,” the man explains. Yates’ mother is tubercular, and she pays for her medicine—and whatever else she requires—with sex. The surrounding community is hardly more nurturing. Yates once watched through the slats of a boxcar while one man murdered another with a shotgun. He’s involved in a long-standing feud with the local bootlegger, Granny Stovall, which started when he hit her with a shovel after he attempted to steal back a dead goat that once belonged to him. A rare role model is a Black miner named Crowe, who takes an interest in the boy and helps him purchase a knife with a stag’s head etched on the blade that Yates has long been eying. When Crowe is sidelined by a mining accident, Yates visits the man during his recovery and learns some of the miner’s hard-won knowledge. Left mostly to fend for himself, Yates spends his time hopping trains, sneaking into circuses, stealing chickens, and romancing Granny Stovall’s granddaughter. But the violence of his environment comes for everyone eventually, and it isn’t long before Yates finds himself caught up in it. “All these acts of violence seemed random,” he observes early in the novel, “but already he divined something unseen moving beneath the surface, bones and blood and nerves beneath the skin.” What sort of man will this boy turn out to be?
Gay is a master of his own brand of woodsy lyricism, mixing the colorful vernacular of his characters with deceptively elegant descriptions: “The train went on into the falling night past farmers and past rich fields heavy with corn, past weary sharecroppers who’d let night fall on them leading their mules from the darkening fields, past leaning clapboard shanties yellowlit against whatever prowled out there in the darkness.” The novel is episodic in its structure, which may have to do with the fact that it was assembled from Gay’s notebooks by a team of his friends (who have already added three other posthumous works to the author’s oeuvre). It will likely be viewed as a minor entry in the Gay canon, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a fascinating read, in part because it riffs so directly on Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, which were apparently foundational to Gay’s reading life. (As Tom and Huck witness their own funeral from the rafters, Yates peeps on the widow who takes him in while she’s bathing…and promptly crashes through the ceiling.) Despite its structural flaws, the writing always sings, and given this is the last of Gay’s unpublished novels, the reader will want to savor every word.
A surprising, vibrant final novel from a legendary Southern writer.Pub Date: June 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-60-489273-4
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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