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ABSENT FRIENDS

From the prolific Busch (Domestic Particulars, Invisible Mending, Too Late American Boyhood Blues, etc.), 14 sometimes touching but as often overreached stories. As if straining for purpose or occasion, Busch takes up situations that frequently have a putatively topical or readied drama about them—a mother has been taken hostage in Lebanon, and her family back home moodily watches her on TV ("Reruns"); a white man is disowned by his emotionally constrained parents after he marries a black woman ("From the New World"); an about-to-be-divorced couple visits one of their parents, a victim of Alzheimer's disease who recognizes neither of them ("Comrades"). A sense of falsely heightened drama pervades the TV-like "Dog Song," with its busily kaleidoscopic overlays of degeneracy, hospitals, and car accidents (a well-off judge, unhappy in marriage, may or may not have attempted suicide by automobile), as it does the time-fractured "Gravity" (in exterior time, a basketball game is being played; in interior time, a woman grieves for the death of her adoptive father). Busch's skill and sensitivity can bring about the simple ring of true gold, as in the best piece here ("Naked"), in which a 13-year-old boy in Brooklyn learns unsettling truths about his parents' past when a close friend (called Uncle Rudy) divorces his wife to marry a younger woman. Almost as true is "To the Hoop" (a teen-aged boy's depression after his mother's suicide), but it and others veer into the robustly mannered, melodramatic, or conscientiously routine—"Greetings from a Farflung Place" (a female singer is a has-been at 41); "In Foreign Tongues" (lonely New Yorkers, long in group therapy, meet for a ritualized dinner and talk); or "Ralph the Duck" (a hard-boiled but all-good man—who works as night watchman at a pretentious college—is haunted, though the reader doesn't know about it until it's sprung at the end, by the memory of a daughter who died young). In all, glimmers of real ore peek out amid the standard in stories that often feel self-consciously willed into being.

Pub Date: April 8, 1989

ISBN: 394-57426-5

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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JURASSIC PARK

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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