Dumb, thin, meretricious, absurd.
A crude debut about youthful marriage and the sad calamities that can befall it—with characters that, at very, very best, fail to earn reader sympathy.
You can see it coming a mile away—that Nick Clifford, successful young broker on the London stock exchange, shouldn’t have upped and married this girl—Trish, she’s called—after so short a courtship. Nick is so head-over-heels that when they’re first apart (Trish is an airline stewardess) he goes around the apartment sniffing the various scents she’s left behind—while she, at the same moment, is banging her brains out with a total stranger who very, very much loves her bum. Well, Trish gets pregnant—by Nick—but, quick as a wink and well before the delivery, her old boyfriend and lover, the crude and ultrasuccessful media-man, Joe, reenters the scene, begs for her hand—and gets it! So Trish and Joe set up household together, while poor paternal Nick watches from the sidelines. When baby-girl Charlotte is born, Nick is smitten like any first daddy, though logistics are complicated now that he’s taken a job in New York and has to jet back and forth over the wide Atlantic to spend sensitive and caring weekends with darling baby. Who really loves who? And what will conceivably come of it all—especially when Trish, though Joe’s sworn and true mate, nevertheless happily bangs away with Nick every time he returns for a London weekend? Nick also has his own stateside sweetie, the gorgeous and flat-flat-flat Sareen (“wow, has she ever come through for him”), who seems conveniently open to any extent of abuse. When Nick and Joe, in a scene stupendously unreal and contrived, are put in the same room together alone, they realize that Trish is banging both—and Trish herself, entering stage left, adds to the subtlety (“Fine, I’m evil. Bitch, cunt, whore. Now fuck off”). After such eloquence, what forgiveness?
Dumb, thin, meretricious, absurd.Pub Date: March 16, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-51050-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
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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