A spellbinding road trip.
A man and his buddy’s corpse journey through the South and its musical legacy in this novel.
It’s 1978, and washed-up folk singer Jim Logan is hanging out in New Orleans with his friend and one-time guitar partner Tom Parrish when Tom up and dies. Fulfilling a promise, Jim sticks Tom in a pine coffin, loads him into a 1951 Ford Country Squire station wagon, and sets out to drive him to Richmond, Virginia, for an improvised burial—all the while pursued by lowlifes in a Chrysler who want to retrieve a valuable diamond Tom swallowed before he died. That’s all the plot device needed to propel this luxurious shaggy dog story onward as Jim drives the back roads, observes the world passing by, and reminisces about his past, goaded by mellow conversational interjections from the voice of Tom’s ghost. The loose-jointed tale unfolds in episodic chapters, almost stand-alone short stories, that introduce Jim to people and places with a musical resonance. He visits the grave of a Delta bluesman; bestows his guitar on a poor boy; gives a ride to a woman in red singing a mysterious song; tours the Shiloh battlefield and discovers a Union soldier’s letter home describing the music of runaway slaves; and visits Elvis Presley’s birthplace, finding it a site of brisk commerce and heartbroken recollections for fans of the King. Jim also meets Chilly Antone, the once-well-known Senator of Western Swing, lobbying to get into the Country Music Hall of Fame; buys a banjo from a hillbilly luthier; spends an afternoon with an old flame; and drinks with other women, hard-boiled and softhearted, in various bars where honky-tonk jukebox soundtracks play in the background. Heslin’s (The Collapse of the Broadway Central, 2018) atmospheric yarn is less a linear narrative than a collection of character studies, landscapes, and soundscapes tied together by Jim’s ruminations on his own and the nation’s souls. It takes in an America of small-town cafes featuring seen-it-all waitresses, stolid national park rangers putting a wholesome face on the bloody chaos of the past, and the ceaseless current of traffic on highways washing past an archipelago of gas stations, set to the ubiquitous sound of pop, rock, and country and braying AM disk jockeys. The author skillfully evokes all these varied voices, from washerwomen to drunken sailors to prim grandmothers, in vignettes that are by turns pungent, funny, melancholy, and wistful, all rendered in a wonderfully impressionistic vernacular that brings to mind a blend of Faulkner and Kerouac. (“In the middle of a thunderstorm, smack inside the corporate limit of Burma Shave, you pick up Bessie Smith and you think you must be drifting off, there’s been no broadcast since the chicken and cornbread at Pep’s Missing Link Cafe, forty miles or so, but there she is, courtesy of a handful of watts somewhere, there she is on the outskirts of winter wheat with the victrola in her voice and your tank more full than empty.”) It’s not always clear where Jim and Tom are headed, but readers who like superb prose and compelling characters will be happy to ride along.
A spellbinding road trip.Pub Date: May 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-941138-92-2
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Three Knolls Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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