Bandbox pulses with a comic energy and detail reminiscent of T.C. Boyle at his most entertainingly manic: it’s a wonderful...
Manhattan period melodrama, handled with roguish finesse.
The byzantine plot begins with a daringly extended exposition in which Mallon, author of other historically based fiction (Henry and Clara, 1994; Dewey Beats Truman, 1997, etc.), introduces nearly two dozen characters. Foremost is Jehoshaphat “Joe” Harris, world-weary editor-in-chief of the struggling men’s monthly magazine Bandbox (think Esquire), in a death struggle with rival publication Cutaway, edited by Harris’s semi-scrupulous former employee Jimmy Gordon. The time is the mid-1920s. Journalists and their molls talk tough, drink hard, and mingle with such varied celebs as (fictional) film seductress Rosemary La Roche and (historical) crime boss Arnold Rothstein. Harris’s bibulous vaudeville reporter “Cuddles” Houlihan pines for his lissome—and plucky—gal assistant Becky Walter. Suave columnist Stuart Newman disgraces Bandbox in a drunken meeting with president Calvin Coolidge. Smoldering photographer’s model Waldo Lyndstrom’s bisexual misadventures necessitate payoffs to police. Novelist-columnist Max Stanwick (a razor-sharp caricature of bon vivant Ben Hecht) moves in and out of criminous environments with Cagney-like aplomb. An animal-loving fact-checker sets out to rescue animals stashed in unsafe conditions for use by a phlegmatic staff photographer. A rigged fiction contest threatens to topple the magazine’s credibility. And when Bandbox subscriber dewy-eyed Indianan John Shepard arrives in NYC and meets his raffish journalistic gods, an indiscreet remark prompted by his overindulgence in “near-beer” gets the kid kidnapped by Rothstein’s goons and spirited away to a California ranch. Somehow Harris’s feisty mag survives this “swirl of plagiarism, narcotics-selling . . . public drunkenness” and other embarrassments. Lost are found, lovers united, and Jehoshaphat trumps the ineffably slimy Gordon and lives to fight another day.
Bandbox pulses with a comic energy and detail reminiscent of T.C. Boyle at his most entertainingly manic: it’s a wonderful ride, and a quantum leap beyond Mallon’s earlier fiction. Ragtime in double-time.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-42116-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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