In his fifth novel, Wolff (The Final Club, 1990, etc.) deftly mixes a detective-like investigation with rites of passage longueurs to unmask a contemporary serpent in an equally contemporary paradise. When 15-year-old Maisie Jenks deliberately dives headfirst from a high cliff on July 4, her family, especially younger brother Ted, and their entire utopian community are never the same again. Ted begins an investigation that moves from the past to the present as he tries to understand just why his sister did what she did. Maisie and Ted are the children of Ann and Jinx, affluent products of the early 1970s who were persuaded by Jinx's charismatic college roommate, Doc Halliday, to invest in a decaying upstate New York camp. Under Halliday's leadership the camp becomes the Blackberry Mountain community, where the houses are aesthetically and environmentally sensitive, and life is fun, ``a series of topping acts.'' Like so many others, Ted adores the gifted Halliday, who ``was brave, hot to climb a roof or a tree, take a kayak over the falls....No bluster just resolve and zip.'' Ted recalls how Maisie, known for her courage and iconoclasm, finally recovers from her fall yet is irrevocably changed (``she cannot abide recollection, especially the habit of recollection''); how idyllic his boyhood seemed despite the underlying tensions; how his parents' marriage broke down; and how the community itself changed. An incestuous episode is suggestive, but not until Ted himself is an adult teaching in a local school does he understand what really happened. A student essay plagiarizing Lolita provides the essential clue, not only to Maisie, but to his parents' divorce as well, and a heartsick Ted ensures that justice is done, even if it means a fatal betrayal. Except for the sluggish mid-section that recalls the past too lengthily and lovingly, an absorbing tale of monstrous evil with an all too human face. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-40638-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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