A masterful, modern-day fantasy of millionaires and madmen, fathers and sons, reality and dreams.
The author of I’m Losing You (1996) slices open the self-satisfied bosom of Los Angeles yet again in his third novel, a sprawling family saga that trades the usual mush-mouthed sentimentalities for cascading shards of knife-edged vignettes.
Wagner sets up his cast with masterly ease. The closest thing we have to a protagonist is 12-year-old Toulouse (Tull) Trotter, who walks his mighty Dane, Pullman, around his sidewalk-less Bel-Air neighborhood. His mother Trinnie (short for Katrina) has been sober all of six months and still seems to be crashing from the weight of having husband Marcus up and disappear one night just after they were married. The vine-choked ruins of the house and garden built for the couple by her richer-than-Croesus father, Louis Trotter, still stand nearby the sprawling estate where she and Tull live with Grandpa Lou. Tull forms a tight, spoiled knot of jet-setting junior-high privilege with his cousins: Lucy, a tense trend-monger who’s deeply in love with Tull and sticks her nose into everyone’s affairs under the guise of researching a novel she’ll never write; and Edward, a young genius, born physically deformed by the effects of Apert’s Syndrome, who designs and sews the Taymor-esque masks and hoods he wears. Their world is momentarily punctured by meeting another young teenager, Amaryllis, who is tossed into the hellish machinery of juvenile placement after her drug-addicted mother dies. The cousins do what they can to help Amaryllis while Tull and Lucy search for Marcus, whom Trinnie had claimed until recently was dead. There are ample moments here for easy satiric thrusts, but, happily, Wagner keeps his focus on his people. Meanwhile, his prose is looping and elegant, yet thoroughly grounded in the day-to-day vernacular of southern California’s self-obsessed elite. If Bret Easton Ellis had immersed himself for several years in 18th-century tales of the decadent French aristocracy, picking up a few hints from Michael Tolkin along the way, this is what you might get.
A masterful, modern-day fantasy of millionaires and madmen, fathers and sons, reality and dreams.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50002-2
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
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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