In Stanford chemistry professor Djerassi's second attempt (following Cantor's Dilemma, 1989) at a genre he calls science- in-fiction, science thrives but fiction is anemic. His themes, announced in a rather didactic foreword, are the graying of Western science and the conflict between collegiality and individual scientists' personal ambition. The narrator, Max Weiss, professor emeritus of biochemistry at Princeton, seeks revenge against a system that forces retirement on people who are still productive. Borrowing an idea from a group of French mathematicians who for years published collectively and anonymously under the pen name Nicolas Bourbaki, he conceives of a stunt designed to show the establishment just how creative oldsters can be. Abetted in this venture by Diane Doyle-Ditmus, a driven feminist historian with access to grant money, Weiss gathers a diverse group of aging scientists with similarly bruised egos: Hiroshi Nishimura, a Tokyo biochemist with a penchant for poetry; Sepp Krzilska, an Austrian molecular biologist; and Charlea Conway, a mathematical biophysicist from Chicago and the group's only female scientist. After establishing the reputation of Diane Skordylis, their chosen pseudonym, with a number of papers in selected journals, they hit the jackpot with a revolutionary technique for replicating fragments of genetic material. (This advance brought its real-life developer, Kary B. Mullis, a Nobel Prize in 1993.) Success spawns problems, however, as the egos of individual scientists resist being submerged, and Skordylis's true identity is soon revealed before an appropriate audience. Unlike Djerassi's memoirs (The Pill, Pygmy Chimps, and Degas' Horse, 1992), which were filled with engaging stories, not much happens here, and when it does, it happens slowly. Moments that should be dramatic have a static quality, and the dialogue frequently sounds stilted. Djerassi takes pains to make the science clear, however, and the announced themes are developed fully. No Michael Crichton thriller, but an interesting picture of how real science operates.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8203-1652-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1994
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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