A superb short-story writer, Baxter disappoints in his second novel (after First Light, 1987)—an uninspired mix of Sinclair Lewis and Ann Beattie. It's a midwestern melodrama of a dysfunctional family with a social conscience, all rendered with a strained seriousness and an intensity that often veer into parody. In a book that's self-consciously about ``the ordinary,'' Baxter's oddball characters can't wait to escape their dreary lives in Michigan, where they pretend to be part of ``the mainstream.'' Wyatt Palmer, ``a standard-issue bureaucrat with a bad haircut,'' is haunted by his family history. His architect father died young, leaving Wyatt with a vague memory of an ironically detached, bitter man who spent weekends drinking and laughing to himself in his basement workshop. With his death, Wyatt's mother Jeanne became ``the absentee landlord of her own body and mind'' (i.e., she went nuts), speaking a cryptic language full of loopy neologisms. Meanwhile, Wyatt was raised by Aunt Ellen, a spinster-bohemian who's writing her own alternative Bible about a God that isn't dead, just indifferent. Wyatt's wife, whom he meets at college, fears a ``dreary settled domesticity,'' which is exactly what she gets when the two move to Wyatt's hometown, where he works in the city manager's office. Wyatt triumphs when a friend builds a new factory in town, but his pride is short-lived. Having gotten a job there for his goof-off cousin Cyril, he realizes that the factory is an environmental disaster, partly responsible for Cyril's fatal cancer. Wyatt's crisis of conscience leads to adultery, a tattoo, and arson, but before he goes completely off the deep end, his family retreats to Brooklyn (!). After all, in New York, everyone's nuts. Such is the level of sophistication in a novel that takes very seriously its commentary about ``creature comforts,'' ``the American Dream,'' and Scientology. There's lots of fortune-cookie wisdom here (``nature loves a vacuum'')—puritanical aphorisms that don't add up to much of a novel.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-393-03437-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1992
Steinbeck's peculiarly intense simplicity of technique is admirably displayed in this vignette — a simple, tragic tale of Mexican little people, a story retold by the pearl divers of a fishing hamlet until it has the quality of folk legend. A young couple content with the humble living allowed them by the syndicate which controls the sale of the mediocre pearls ordinarily found, find their happiness shattered when their baby boy is stung by a scorpion. They dare brave the terrors of a foreign doctor, only to be turned away when all they can offer in payment is spurned. Then comes the miracle. Kino find a great pearl. The future looks bright again. The baby is responding to the treatment his mother had given. But with the pearl, evil enters the hearts of men:- ambition beyond his station emboldens Kino to turn down the price offered by the dealers- he determines to go to the capital for a better market; the doctor, hearing of the pearl, plants the seed of doubt and superstition, endangering the child's life, so that he may get his rake-off; the neighbors and the strangers turn against Kino, burn his hut, ransack his premises, attack him in the dark — and when he kills, in defense, trail him to the mountain hiding place- and kill the child. Then- and then only- does he concede defeat. In sorrow and humility, he returns with his Juana to the ways of his people; the pearl is thrown into the sea.... A parable, this, with no attempt to add to its simple pattern.
Pub Date: Nov. 24, 1947
ISBN: 0140187383
Page Count: 132
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1947
Back to a Jurassic Park sideshow for another immensely entertaining adventure, this fashioned from the loose ends of Crichton's 1990 bestseller. Six years after the lethal rampage that closed the primordial zoo offshore Costa Rica, there are reports of strange beasts in widely separated Central American venues. Intrigued by the rumors, Richard Levine, a brilliant but arrogant paleontologist, goes in search of what he hopes will prove a lost world. Aided by state-of- the-art equipment, Levine finds a likely Costa Rican outpostbut quickly comes to grief, having disregarded the warnings of mathematician Ian Malcolm (the sequel's only holdover character). Malcolm and engineer Doc Thorne organize a rescue mission whose ranks include mechanical whiz Eddie Carr and Sarah Harding, a biologist doing fieldwork with predatory mammals in East Africa. The party of four is unexpectedly augmented by two children, Kelly Curtis, a 13-year-old "brainer," and Arby Benton, a black computer genius, age 11. Once on the coastal island, the deliverance crew soon links up with an unchastened Levine and locates the hush-hush genetics lab complex used to stock the ill- fated Jurassic Park with triceratops, tyrannosaurs, velociraptors, etc. Meanwhile, a mad amoral scientist and his own group, in pursuit of extinct creatures for biotech experiments, have also landed on the mysterious island. As it turns out, the prehistoric fauna is hostile to outsiders, and so the good guys as well as their malefic counterparts spend considerable time running through the triple-canopy jungle in justifiable terror. The far-from-dumb brutes exact a gruesomely heavy toll before the infinitely resourceful white-hat interlopers make their final breakout. Pell-mell action and hairbreadth escapes, plus periodic commentary on the uses and abuses of science: the admirable Crichton keeps the pot boiling throughout.
Pub Date: Sept. 28, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41946-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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