It’s not a total success: Without the tether of a firm plot, all the time-folding makes the narrative feel static, an artful...
A recursive and beguiling tale of a collapsing marriage by the veteran Kincaid (The Autobiography of My Mother, 1996, etc.).
Early in this slim, challenging novel, Kincaid drops a reference to Gertrude Stein, whose repetitive rhythmic prose is a clear inspiration (“it was her presence in his life that kept him from being who he really was, who he really was, who he really was”). The plot centers on Mr. and Mrs. Sweet, a couple whose marriage is shot through with passivity and resentment, though the source of the tension is never quite explicit. To be sure, Mr. Sweet is a New York-bred pianist and composer who hates living in Vermont. (His opus-in-progress is called This Marriage Is Dead.) But Kincaid represents the struggle as something more than a typical case of domestic dysfunction. The family lives in the home of novelist and short story writer Shirley Jackson, who famously produced her modern gothic tales while raising four children, and Mrs. Sweet similarly labors to balance creativity and domesticity. Their two children are named Persephone and Heracles, and the story sometimes shifts into a broad allegorical mode that, like those names, echoes Greek mythology. (In one scene, Heracles pulls off his father’s testicles and throws them all the way to the Atlantic.) In some ways, this book is a tribute to modernism, in its surrealism, in its Stein-ian prose and in the way Kincaid cannily merges past and present events to evoke mood; what cubist painters did with point of view, she does with past and present tense to suggest a persistent melancholy in the Sweet home.
It’s not a total success: Without the tether of a firm plot, all the time-folding makes the narrative feel static, an artful set of complaints. Yet Kincaid’s audaciousness is winning. She’s taken some much-needed whacks at the conventional domestic novel.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-18056-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
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 tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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