A spiky story replete with decadence and yet told with an undeniable, unshakable grace.
Rock ’n’ roll girl figures burning out is much, much better than just fading away.
Long before she was fronting the international rock sensation Anaconda, Lee Annis was a young wife stuck in Vegas, married to a gun-collecting doctor, with a newborn she barely acknowledged. Of course, nobody knows that, though some media wags have posited that the color of her nipples, which can be seen quite clearly on an album cover, prove that she had once had a child. Nowadays, Lee does what she can as a member of the international rock-star jet set to burn out the memory of that existence, along with a windswept, hazily described Montana childhood. Never one for leaving things alone, Lee sleeps with and then tortures herself thinking about what-could-have-been with bandmate Billy, who’s actually with another bandmate, Alessia, but decides eventually to marry a third girl. So, after a brief interlude that gives some unresolved background on the whole Vegas/child thing, Lee spends a good many pages mooning about London and Los Angeles, thinking about Billy and the band’s imminent demise, and being generally, fabulously, self-destructive. Although binging on random, greedy sex, she knows it has to end, and soon: “This cock-to-mouth existence is doing me in.” But Lee is compulsive, if nothing else, stuck in Möbius strip loop of rage, sex, and desire for an unattainable peaceful existence (which, if she was ever given, she’d most likely toss over in a second). The only things sustaining her are the “analgesics of sex and drugs and shopping” and the near-volcanic upwellings of heartache that keep propelling her forward into the void. Irish second-novelist Collins (Cannibals, 2003) lets Lee tell her story in all its dark star fury, just swan-diving into her mangled psyche and not trying to shoehorn it into the typical rise-and-decline rock-star/addict narrative.
A spiky story replete with decadence and yet told with an undeniable, unshakable grace.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-224-06927-6
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Jonathan Cape/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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