Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. 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. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans.

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. In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II. Allowing a first-person narrator to withhold the truth until the climactic moment is a neat trick, one handily accomplished mostly through Jun’s convincing voice, which Revoyr conveys in lucid, precise and period-appropriate prose.Īlthough the pace lags in sections-notably a cross-country train tour which seems to occur in real time-all in all this is a pulse-quickening, deliciously ironic serving of Hollywood noir. He harbors a guilty secret, which the hoopla surrounding a movie release will expose. But the murder isn’t the only reason Jun is publicity shy. All three are cleared, but Elizabeth drinks herself to death and Nora is forever consigned to her mother’s less than tender mercies. There are three suspects: Elizabeth and Nora, who each had romantic designs on Ashley, and Jun, Ashley’s rival for Elizabeth. Ashley Tyler, a British director, was found murdered in his bungalow. Jun’s excitement almost overwhelms a nagging suspicion that a comeback might engender a deeper inquiry into Jun’s role in one of early Hollywood’s most lurid unsolved mysteries.

Seamlessly interwoven flashbacks detail Jun’s ascension to stardom despite anti-Japanese prejudice.

Although excited by the prospect of working again, Jun is loath to revisit the circumstances that prematurely curtailed his career in 1922.

This being Los Angeles, Nick is shopping a screenplay with a star turn for Jun-as an elderly Japanese man who is mistaken for a former war criminal by his rural California neighbors. But troubling memories of his days as a controversial movie star resurface when journalist Nick Bellinger interviews Jun about his flaming youth and leading ladies, including siren Elizabeth Banks and Nora Niles, an ingénue dominated by a harridan of a stage mother. It’s 1964, and Jun Nakayama, 73, is content to dwell in prosperous obscurity, monitoring his real-estate investments and hiking the Hollywood Hills. Revoyr’s third novel ( Southland, 2003, etc.) is loosely based on a scandal of Hollywood’s silent era. Aging Japanese actor, a former silent-screen sex symbol, is offered a second chance at notoriety.

The Age of Dreaming by Nina Revoyr