One of this indefatigable author’s best books in some time.
The latest of Oates’ numerous collections offers 14 tales variously concerned with family relationships and crises.
Nine characteristic stories open the volume on a strong note. A married couple driving on the freeway discovers the fragility of their closeness in “Panic” when they are threatened by a school bus carrying teenagers who appear to be pointing a gun at them. “Landfill” poignantly shows a hardworking Latino family destroyed when their college-student son becomes the victim of a fraternity hazing. A young girl hideously scarred in a household “accident” seeks desperately for a way to survive and forgive her disturbed older sister in the breathlessly powerful “Special,” one of Oates’ best short works, which radiates the feeling of lived experience. In “The Blind Man’s Sighted Daughters,” reminiscent of D.H. Lawrence at his most intuitive, an embittered old man’s guilt over a crime for which he escaped punishment becomes the means by which his adult daughters put him in the emotional place he belongs and, just possibly, save themselves. Other stories focused repetitively on filial and fraternal attraction-repulsion (e.g., “Cutty Sark,” “Vigilante”) are less compelling, and the five concluding tales, primarily satirical, feel too familiar. “Dear Joyce Carol” shows a prominent author being harassed in letters by a deranged admirer who proclaims herself Joyce Carol’s rival and equal; it’s a concept Oates has used a few too many times. “Mistrial” tells the old, old story about a lonely juror attracted to a charmingly sinister defendant. “Dear Husband” is yet another companion to Oates’ novels Blonde and My Sister, My Love, channeling the story of child-murdering mother Andrea Yates into a fulsome autobiographical letter written from prison. Still, the onrushing prose and stabbing emotional intensity that are Oates’ greatest strengths imbue the volume with compulsive readability.
One of this indefatigable author’s best books in some time.Pub Date: March 31, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-170431-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
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
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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