A short, funny, and oddly engrossing tale about a man looking for a woman.
In this comic novel, a librarian searches for the potential love of his life while on a cross-country road trip.
After years of loneliness, Dennis Dunkle reluctantly joins the dating site Amorous After Fifty to look for love. There, he gets pinged by Denise Dunedin, “only because she was also from Saint Plato—although not the New Jersey Saint Plato where Dennis has spent most of his life but the North Dakota one, a place he hadn’t heard of since grade school, when fourth-graders in the two Saint Platos wrote letters back and forth.” But it isn’t long before Dennis realizes that Denise is the woman he’s meant to spend the rest of his life with. That’s why, when she invites him to come live with her and her cat, Tuffy, in North Dakota, he abruptly quits his job as the librarian at Saint Plato Community College; packs his own cat, Sebastian, into his weathered Chrysler Cruiser; straps a toilet to the roof (Denise’s is broken); and heads out on a hastily planned road trip across the continent. When he reaches North Dakota, however, he finds a note saying that Denise has run off with another man—a man from Saint Plato, Alabama. After spending a night in her house, Dennis gets a call from Denise asking him to meet her in that third Saint Plato. She made a mistake, she claims, and she’s willing to marry Dennis if he just comes to Alabama. Dennis does and is informed that he’s just missed her. There’s another clue left for him, another promise, another destination—but as Dennis quickly learns, actually getting to Denise is much harder than driving to any one point on the map. Simms’ (The Stars of Axuncanny, 2006) rapid prose is full of detail and cartoonish humor, as when Dennis remembers how his mother despised him and his affection for felines: “The more she hated cats, the more she hated Dennis, although she already hated him a lot. She tried to poison him once, he was three, but the hot dog smelled funny to him. New type of hot dog. Eat! she demanded.” There’s a bit of 1990s nihilism underwriting the book’s worldview, but it never gets too desperate or ceases with the one-liners. The novel’s premise is unbelievable and yet also completely tenable given the slanted logic of the world the author creates. Real human relationships have the same push and pull as Dennis and Denise’s, even if they usually don’t require so many road trips, and it’s fairly easy to sympathize with the protagonist’s quixotic mission. Even Denise manages to feel less like a villain than an intriguing mystery caught up in her own equally quixotic whirlwind. The story becomes progressively weirder without losing its buoyant tone, and despite the satirical edge, readers should come to truly care for Dennis and wish him success in his quest.
A short, funny, and oddly engrossing tale about a man looking for a woman.Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-60489-215-4
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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