A scattered, Beat-inspired novel featuring the best-laid schemes of jazz festivals and frenzied fixes gone awry.
Alberts’ debut novel tells a story based on the true journeys of jazz artists and junkies in the 1960s.
During a period of grand experimentation with drugs and music, San Francisco jazz piano prodigy Louis Parker yearns to share the spotlight with such greats as John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Chet Baker. To be more like his heroes, he experiments with “the narcotic state” to achieve the precision, sensitivity and focus he hears in the “thick rhythmic delight of jazz.” Like them, he falls prey to addiction, confusing the excitement that floods his body when he plays music with the rushing sensation caused by injecting “the elegant toxic poison” into his bloodstream. Although the narrator claims that life’s purpose is to seek out the “mystic glue” of friendship, Louis’s sights are always on the next drug score—and a little bit of intimate companionship when the nod is over. His associates, some real and well known—Janis Joplin makes a cameo—and some not quite there, are mostly “dope fiends.” Louis tries to get high from morning glory seeds, and uses meth, pot, LSD, PCP, MDA and other drugs, but nothing quells Louis’ “hurt-the-deep, sealed-up loneliness” as heroin does. Despite Louis’ repeated attempts at getting clean and harrowing stints in the justice systems of Oregon and California—as well as Gestalt therapy sessions—Louis, like his heroes, ultimately fails. Alberts sometimes channels a spontaneous poetry worthy of Kerouac’s best, and his narrative, full of confusing, hazy, blood-spattered recollections and imaginary characters, recalls the writings of Burroughs. That said, the novel switches gears erratically from first-person to third-person points of view. Occasional inconsistencies make the book more perplexing; early on, Louis repeats the word, “exulted,” when he refers to his desire to be one of them, and 204 pages later, Louis receives his “chance to be exalted.”
A scattered, Beat-inspired novel featuring the best-laid schemes of jazz festivals and frenzied fixes gone awry.Pub Date: May 17, 2010
ISBN: 978-1450093217
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2013
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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