Gass, now 88, clearly has endings on his mind, which he addresses with fearsome brio and wit.
Misanthropy, atrocity, the Midwest—Gass revisits some familiar themes in this novel, though this ride is smoother than its epic predecessor, The Tunnel (1995).
The hero of this engaging, melancholy novel is Joseph Skizzen, an Ohio music professor who consistently dissembles to get ahead in life, from the driver’s license he faked to get his first job to the CV he invented to enter academia. But, Gass wants us to ask, aren’t we all born into lives of fraudulence? Joseph’s father, we learn early on, repeatedly changed identities to smuggle himself and his family out of Austria in advance of the Nazi horrors. In a struggle to reckon with that past, Joseph privately maintains an Inhumanity Museum, filled with newspaper clippings and photos of war, genocide and further proofs of mankind at its worst. Joseph’s deep-seated frustration with man’s inherent insincerity is exemplified by a sentence he obsessively revises: “The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure.” Gass positions Joseph as symbolic of civilization’s pervasive mediocrity: The title refers to a piano note but also suggests middle-class anxieties, mid-20th-century social catastrophes, Midwestern simplicity and middle-of-the-pack intelligence. (Joseph was a C student.) In comparison to the black-heartedness of The Tunnel, this is practically a comedy, and its pleasures shouldn’t be discounted. Gass remains a master of apt metaphors, graceful sentences and a flinty, unforgiving brand of humor; it may be the most entertaining novel you’ll read that half wishes humanity was wiped off the map. And though Joseph feels more like a symbol than a character, his neuroses over God, power and survival make him a rare creature in contemporary American fiction: a man as concerned with the big picture as with himself.
Gass, now 88, clearly has endings on his mind, which he addresses with fearsome brio and wit.Pub Date: March 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-70163-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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