Nytimes Review of the Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
Kristin Hannah Reinvented Herself. She Thinks America Can Do the Aforementioned.
In "The Four Winds," the author of "The Nightingale" and "The Great Solitary" takes readers back to another era of ecology disaster, economic collapse and fresh starts.
Growing up in California and the Pacific Northwest, Kristin Hannah never wanted to become a novelist. It was a career for dreamers, she thought, kids who took artistic writing classes and scribbled stories from the time they were 6.
"I just wasn't that person," she said in a video interview from her home outside Seattle. "Until I was in my third year of law schoolhouse and my mother was dying of breast cancer. Every day I would visit her and mutter about my classes. Ane afternoon, my mother said, 'Don't worry, you're going to be a writer.'"
This was news to Hannah. The ii decided to write a romance novel set in 18th-century Scotland. "That was her choice," Hannah said. "I would accept written horror. Just it gave usa something to talk about."
In 1985, the day she wrote the first 9 pages — her inaugural foray into fiction — she received a call from her father, telling her she needed to get to the hospital. There, before her mother died, Hannah, then 24, had a chance to whisper, "I started."
But she put the book on agree and resumed her original programme, practicing law at a Seattle business firm — until, she said, "a few years later, I went into labor at xiv weeks and was crippled until my son was born. I realized that I probably wouldn't have more children and I wanted to exist abode for the first few years. And so I thought, I'll try writing a volume."
But non the one she started with her mother. "That was a terrible, terrible book," Hannah said. "Information technology'southward at present in a box that says 'Do Not Publish Even After Death.'"
She published her debut novel, "A Scattering of Sky," in 1991. It was a historical romance set in Alaska — a place she returned to near iii decades later in "The Great Alone," which sold two meg copies in the United States.
Hannah experienced an even bigger breakout hit with "The Nightingale," her 2015 historical novel, which sold 4.5 million copies worldwide. Her books have at present been translated into 43 languages, her proper name is an ballast tenant on best-seller lists, and you would exist hard-pressed to find a volume club that has not discussed one of her novels. Of her mother's long-ago prediction, Hannah said, "I tell yous, this woman is somewhere with a martini and a cigarette telling all her friends, 'I told y'all so.'"
Hannah, 60, lives with her married man; her son is at present grown. Gone are the days when she had to squeeze in bursts of writing effectually naps and schoolhouse hours. She works from 8 a.yard. to four p.m. near days, writing drafts in longhand on yellow legal pads. "I can write in my backyard, by the fire, on the embankment, on an airplane," Hannah said. "Information technology helps to be disciplined, but I also believe creativity follows field of study."
Her 24th book, "The Four Winds," which comes out on Tuesday, seems eerily prescient in 2021, with its Depression-era tale of fated land, xenophobia, fear of contagion — and determination to join forces and rebuild. Its message is galvanizing and hopeful: We are a nation of scrappy survivors. Nosotros've been in dire straits before; nosotros will be again. Agree your people close. Her publisher, St. Martin'south Press, is planning an initial press of 1 million copies.
"I wanted to tell a quintessentially American story," Hannah said. "The Grit Bowl was the greatest ecological disaster in American history and that, combined with the partisan split up of the Great Depression, really spoke to me."
The protagonist of "The Four Winds" is Elsa Martinelli, a single mother of 2 who, in 1935, leaves a parched family unit subcontract in Lonesome Tree, Texas, for California. She is unmoved by brochures promising milk and dear in the "Land of Opportunity." She needs steady work and fresh air for her son, who is recovering from "grit pneumonia," a then-mutual disquiet on the Dandy Plains. (Readers who feel inconvenienced past cloth masks may feel differently later on spending time with characters who wear gas masks in their homes.)
In the San Joaquin Valley, the Martinellis trade i set of terrible circumstances for another. Piece of work is scarce. Locals are cruelly suspicious of newcomers, who they believe comport disease. Nobody volition hire to "Okies," every bit migrants were known — regardless of whether they were from Oklahoma — and so the family settles into a squalid camp on the banks of an irrigation ditch.
How Elsa claws her way out is the crux of "The Four Winds." Friendship is a lifeline, as it is for many women in Hannah's books, including the pair in "Firefly Lane." On Midweek, Netflix begins streaming its television accommodation of that book, starring Katherine Heigl and Sarah Chalke.
"I deeply value my female friendships. That's something that has been reinforced in this pandemic," Hannah said. "And so information technology made sense to me that Elsa finds a mother and a girlfriend. Those relationships requite her the ability to stand up upward for herself."
One of Hannah's closest friends is her writing partner of more than 30 years — the novelist Megan Risk, whom she met early in her career at a lunch hosted by a local writers' group.
"We were both in the bathroom at the same time. We traded telephone numbers at the sink and decided to read each others' manuscripts," Run a risk said in a phone interview. "It was this instantaneous connexion, the most weirdly fated coming together I've ever had."
They started talking on the telephone every twenty-four hour period, honing their work according to writing communication from authors such as Dwight Swain, Jack Bickham and Robert McKee. "Our process changes every couple of years depending on what we're writing and what'southward going on in our lives," Hannah said, "but generally I'll requite Megan 150 or 200 pages, and that's the beginning."
"I think our critiques would devastate other people," joked Take a chance, whose latest novel is "A Splendid Ruin." "But at that place's likewise this trust. We know each others' histories. When Kristin calls me and says 'I'yard feeling this way,' I become, 'You always feel that fashion.' And she'll go, 'I exercise?' Kristin knows story better than whatever person I've ever known. She has it in her bones."
In 1993, Hannah had another fortuitous encounter — this time at a hotel bar during a romance writers' convention, where she met her at present-longtime editor, Jennifer Enderlin, who is the president and publisher of St. Martin's Publishing Grouping.
In a telephone interview, Enderlin traced Hannah's many reinventions throughout her career — from mass-market romance writer to hardcover writer to book-order best seller to spinner of historical sagas. "With 'The Nightingale,' she went from being considered 'women'south fiction' to being considered a literary novelist," Enderlin said. "She has an instinct for why something worked; she's analytical and intuitive at the same time."
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Equally she worked on "The Iv Winds," Hannah was inspired by Dorothea Lange's photographs, peculiarly "Woman of the High Plains" — "You can see how tired, afraid and heroic she is all at one time" — and by the writings of Sanora Babb, an aspiring journalist who documented life in migrant camps for the Farm Security Administration only to accept her ain novel in progress scooped past "The Grapes of Wrath."
"She took copious notes on conversations with residents, what they cared about and what they were having trouble with," Hannah said before describing how Babb'due south dominate funneled these observations to John Steinbeck. "Amazing, right?"
She smiled ruefully. "I'k devoted to putting women in the forefront of historical stories. To telling women'southward stories."
"The Four Winds" includes a few lines from Babb's novel, "Whose Names Are Unknown," which was finally published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2004: "One thing was left, as clear and perfect as a driblet of rain — the desperate need to stand together … They would rising and fall and, in their falling, rise over again."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/books/kristin-hannah-four-winds.html
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