A light, entertaining novel about greed, marital love and the inexplicable desire for solitude.
In Archdeacon’s debut novel, a 58-year-old millionaire and member of the Queen’s Counsel sells his house and belongings in an attempt to begin a new life alone while his wife is away.
John Penry-Hudson is a hard-working, respectable lawyer en route to fulfilling his dream of serving as one of Her Majesty’s judges. His wife, Phyllis, has been spending increasingly lengthy amounts of time with her aging mother a few hours away. When Phyllis takes a three-month leave, John suddenly decides to simply up and leave his wife, his lucrative career and his native country—seemingly without forethought or motivation. The day Phyllis departs, John embarks upon a hasty, complicated plan to sell the house (which was solely in his name), write a series of letters to cover his tracks and convince everyone that his wife has left him. Just as everything begins falling into place and John successfully escapes to Spain briefly in an attempt to foil potential pursuers, Phyllis suddenly appears at his hotel with a detective, resulting in an international chase that takes John to France, Switzerland and an imaginary country called Grundia, where he intends to settle. Because John has technically done nothing illegal, he’s off the hook—that is until his wife, either spurred by love or vengeance, takes matters into her own hands. Written in clean, safe prose that occasionally drags—particularly in the overwrought dialogue and while John gets his affairs in order—Archdeacon’s novel is a fun, domestic thriller reminiscent of some of Graham Greene’s work. But something is missing; from the beginning, John’s motivations are frustratingly unclear. “He had originally intended to teach Phyllis a lesson she would never forget,” the narrator explains nearly a third of the way into the book, and until this point, aside from explaining that John and Phyllis’s relationship was fairly stable, that is as much information as the narration provides, leaving much of the storyline feeling frivolous without any context for their relationship. Still, the confusion behind John’s apparent lack of impetus offers enough tension to keep the pages turning.
A light, entertaining novel about greed, marital love and the inexplicable desire for solitude.Pub Date: July 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-1434338686
Page Count: 302
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2012
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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