Despite needlessly confusing chronology, a memorable debut, likely to make waves.
The Finn in question is not Huck, but his father, a “strange sad monster” in newcomer Clinch’s bold and deeply disturbing work.
Bad as he was in Twain’s masterpiece, here Pap Finn has ballooned into something far worse: “Incarnate personal evil.” Clinch eschews a linear narrative, looping back and forth between time periods; he aims to cast a wide net, pillorying not just one individual but the pathology of racism. That began with Pap’s own father, Judge Finn, who paid double for a white servant to avoid proximity to blacks. Pap inherits the racism while hungering for black women, the choicest of forbidden fruit. The woman who lasts the longest is Mary, stolen by Finn off a sternwheeler. He locks her up in a cabin on the Judge’s grounds until they’re discovered and banished; Finn strangles the tattletale responsible (his first murder). Finn and Mary move to a ramshackle house by the Mississippi; a savvy riverman, Finn runs his trotlines, sells his fish and spends the proceeds on whiskey. In time, Mary gives birth to Huck, who can pass for white, a huge relief to Finn. A few incidents duplicate those in Twain, but the novels could not be more different; instead of Huck’s unlettered child’s voice, we have an omniscient narrative, grave, erudite and rich in the secretions of adult knowledge; terse dialogue acts as an effective counterpoint. All along, Clinch’s intent is to probe the nature of evil. Mary and Huck briefly escape Finn’s drunken reign of terror and are taken in by the Widow Douglas; Finn reclaims them and strangles Mary in her sleep, then skins her like a rabbit. Much later, Finn scribbles incriminating drawings on his walls; whether or not they show a conscience at work, they will lead directly to Finn’s own murder by another black woman, his next intended victim.
Despite needlessly confusing chronology, a memorable debut, likely to make waves.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2007
ISBN: 1-4000-6591-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
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 strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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