If those who devour such novels are willing to laugh at them, Elliott might be a bigger hit on bookshelves than he’s been...
The mysteries of history—and the rash of bestselling novels they’ve spawned—inspire this slapstick satire that is more fun than the sum of its clichés.
While less literary than Steve Martin, comedian-actor-writer Elliott (star of TV’s Get a Life and the film Cabin Boy) offers more than the recycled monologue bits of most comedians-turned-authors. The patron saint of Elliott’s satiric sensibility here might well be Mel Brooks, for Elliott shows the same sort of gleeful relish in skewering the absurdities of the historical crime thriller genre that Brooks has in his big-screen parodies. After reading Elliott’s account of New York’s little-known 19th-century serial killer—Jack the Jolly Thwacker—it will be all the tougher to swallow the quasi-historical tone of The Historian, The Alienist, even The Da Vinci Code without gagging. Among those involved in the pursuit of Jolly Jack, who disembowels prostitutes after “thwacking” them, are a reporter named Liz Smith, a pre-presidential, genitally pierced and relentlessly flatulent Teddy Roosevelt and the time-traveling author himself. Along the way, they encounter the nefarious (and lisping) Boss Tweed, the mysterious Mummers and a marauding street gang of toddlers. The narrative leaps between present and past, with the author alternating between advancing the plot and addressing the reader, reinforcing his persona as a hapless buffoon in the process. The more convoluted the conspiracy surrounding the serial murders becomes, the more absurd the contrivances of this sort of historical fiction seem: According to 19th-century history as rewritten by Elliott, a history in which a calculating Yoko Ono and a perennially wrinkled Don Imus play roles, it was New York that actually sparked the Great Chicago Fire.
If those who devour such novels are willing to laugh at them, Elliott might be a bigger hit on bookshelves than he’s been onscreen.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2005
ISBN: 1-4013-5245-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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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