Doctorow continues his long romance with the past in this microcosmic story of a sensitive boy's early life (up to the fifth grade) in the Bronx of the 1930's. What might have been merely a long, warm bath in nostalgia becomes—through the sheer craft of the book—an evocative meditation on time past, and, by constant implication, time present. Edgar Altschuler grows up in a world now gone (a world of leather shaving strops and the horse-drawn carts of vegetable vendors), and his story itself, however compelling, is nothing if not familiar: as he grows up, his parents offer him a polarity of great extremes within which he must somehow shape his own identity. His father is adventurous, liberal-minded, and idealistically impulsive, but not always honest or sexually faithful, and he comes close (among other things, he loses his music-store business) to letting the family drift toward ruin. The quietly suffering mother—desirous of order and propriety and continuity—does what she can to shore up the family's lives against these potential ruins. Meanwhile, world history moves on, always just off-stage, but hinted at again and again, in ways both large and small (Edgar almost dies of a burst appendix, and thus learns of mortality; he witnesses the bizarre schoolyard death of a woman by car accident; and—in one of the book's most wondrous of many wondrous passages—he watches the great airship Hindenburg float marvellously through the sky en route to its disastrous and fiery end). Late in the book, Edgar enters an essay contest on the subject of The Typical American Boy (he writes: "He is kind. . . He knows the value of a dollar. He looks death in the face"). The essay wins honorable mention, and Edgar and his family are given free passes to the World's Fair, where they gaze upon the marvels of a clean, trim, idealized future—while clouds of cruelty and doom (the year is 1940) gather around the edges of all the world. With few overt concessions to the nostalgia-trade (nylon stockings are "new"), this is a delicately-faceted work, perhaps Doctorow's most austere and uncompromised since The Book of Daniel, though far more humble in its material—a quiet homage to a domestic world now quite gone, and one that makes our own world all the more frightening and awesome by its absence. Heavy with literary indebtedness, the book nevertheless, by its consistency of both passion and craft, achieves the radiance and sinuosity of a masterpiece.
Pub Date: Nov. 22, 1985
ISBN: 081297820X
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1985
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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