Despite bursts of clarity, Shaughnessy’s debut brings to mind the great and difficult voluptuaries of modern verse: like Hart Crane, she invents words for their trilling sonorities (’spifflicated,” “cravesty,” ’slimsy—); like John Ashberry, she feigns a childlike voice that surreally joins odd words into a diction of her own creation. Striking, unyielding, the poems in this first by the New York City—based poet burst with the ripe images of female sexuality, with her homoerotic kinkiness, and her admitted non-sense—all rendered aslant, as she defines “writing” in one poem: “The juice knife has its art cut, and ran.” Shaughnessy stretches her verses so tight they threaten everywhere to snap, and meaning bounces off them like off a trampoline. Many of these intense poems address a lover, sometimes gone, in a voice tortured with anger and lust—the sort of love/hate that animates the great work of Sappho and Catullus, from whom Shaughnessy also learns the language of invective and despair. “Rise,” a seemingly harmless bit celebrating a lover’s return, ends with a real kicker: the threat of poison; in “Parallax, ” after dismissing men, she begs her lover to seek with her a permanent ’suckhole.” Her slang is original, often sexy: in the title poem, she speaks of her “hussy spot,” and elsewhere locates “the strumpet muscle,” the heart. The few times Shaughnessy makes conventional sense, her verse disappoints: on finding her Japanese mother’s diary, she sympathizes with her imprisonment within English; in “Panopticon,” the poet, on the World Trade Center viewing deck, watches her bedroom window where her roommate borrows her vibrator. There’s lots of stink, and a voracious appetite, in these weird poems, with their often impenetrable diction, and uncommon sense. Strictly for the author’s co-synsethesiaists.
Pub Date: June 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-374-17712-0
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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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