A humorous and entertaining character study of two brothers besieged by the preposterous.
In this lightly absurdist comedy, fraternal twin brothers find their lives upended by a narcissistic writer and exacerbated by their unresolved rivalry.
Jay and George Raven are a curious and contentious pair of siblings living in North London. The foulmouthed George is a celebrity biographer who flamboyantly reinvents his subjects’ lives for his readers. All he says and does is equal parts clever and crushing, and he rarely lets up on his brother for being born mere minutes before he was. In contrast, Jay is a librarian and serial apologizer, envious of George’s good looks and his confidence as a gay man. These are the reasons he’s never come out himself, and in fact Jay denies he’s gay despite his brother’s insistence that he is. Still, Jay is excited about “the event,” a meet-up with a man, supposedly a stranger, whom he will join naked in bed for just a conversation, an odd yet enticing interview George has set up. But the night before the event, George’s beautiful friend Bendy Andy, who spends time dressing as a stunning Marilyn Monroe with a Meryl Streep nose, introduces the siblings to a popular writer named Ben Eversham. Ben claims to be a fan of George’s but greets him with contempt, exposing himself as a compulsive liar. Ben quickly entangles Jay in a night of coincidences and mysteries involving the proprietors of a local cafe, escorts, organized crime, and two name-dropping police officers. The event is equally surprising for Jay, as the man in the bed turns out to be his brother’s best friend, Tom, “George’s only love.” But Tom is also a lost love of Jay’s—a situation George paradoxically orchestrates but also seethes with contempt over. Early on, George notes that “nonsense is the meaning of life,” a welcoming nod to the good time that awaits readers.
Cacoyannis’ novel recalls Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in that beyond one uproarious moment when Jay and Andy have to stop George from hanging Ben with a makeshift noose, much of the action takes place offstage. The characters’ interpersonal conflicts and the fallout of Ben’s unscrupulous conduct are dealt with in the book’s consuming, sometimes volatile dialogue. But it is not just what the characters say that charms in each scene. Even minor acts, such as ordering drinks at a restaurant, reveal much about the players through their tics, pauses, and silences with an impressive thrift. The story employs a subtle absurdism in its comedy, crafting a world that could almost be real (most of these characters are writers, models, and artists, after all) save for the overwhelming volume of fun coincidences that even later disclosures cannot completely explain. One revelation encompasses a drunken automobile accident, a rare tonal misstep that goes largely unresolved. The tragedy seems far too grave because it directly involves George as opposed to the often comedic, criminal debauchery of Ben. Yet in a book of big, farcically dramatic moments, such as the fighting over the noose, Ben’s projectile vomiting, and Jay’s fainting from the heat like a Victorian protagonist, this level of seriousness is largely left by the wayside for more amusing fumblings by the brothers and their lovers.
A humorous and entertaining character study of two brothers besieged by the preposterous.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2023
ISBN: 9798373946506
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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