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A DISTANT FLAME

A NOVEL OF THE CIVIL WAR

The protagonist is a weakness, but buffs will find compensations here. More than 80,000 books have been written about the...

A sickly, sensitive, Shakespeare-spouting 17-year-old becomes a Confederate Army killing machine.

The trouble is that Charlie Merrill spends much of his time stretching credulity. As he assesses the illustrious General Joe Johnston, he hardly seems his age: “He has restored hope,” Charlie tells his own commanding general, adding that that’s “[no] small thing for a man young or old.” This at 17? And a private talking to a general? Which army? What planet? Clearly, General Patrick Cleburne, hero of the Tennessee campaign, has taken a shine to youthful Charlie: he plays chess with him, swaps philosophies and literary quotations with him, sends senior officers to fetch him to his tent whenever the press of military affairs permits, and presents him with the last of his precious Whitworths: that marvelous rifle issued only to super-snipers. The process of Charlie’s achieving sharpshooter stardom could have been interesting, but it gets short shrift, offered as just one of those ironic contradictions: Charlie’s “a bookish boy who also loved guns.” At 15, he was almost carried off by a lingering illness, recovered, fell in love with a beautiful Bostonian, lost her, then left for the war a year or so later, where he slays with biblical ferocity in behalf of a cause he’s lost faith in. Flash forward to 1914, and there’s Charlie, venerable now, a respected writer and retired newspaperman, preparing to give a speech on the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Atlanta but in a funk because he doesn’t quite know what to say about it. Never mind, Charlie being Charlie, he delivers, and the crowd erupts accordingly: cheers, screams, tears even—bull’s-eye!

The protagonist is a weakness, but buffs will find compensations here. More than 80,000 books have been written about the American Civil War—and, with authoritative, vividly rendered battle scenes, Williams (Blue Crystal, 1993, etc.) earns a place somewhere, well, at least in the upper quadrant.

Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2004

ISBN: 0-312-33252-1

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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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THE RUMOR

Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.

Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.

Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”

Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.

Pub Date: June 16, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015

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