Higgins's matchless ear for dialogue often overshadows the way his art relies on digressive anecdotes for its garrulous music and its flavorsome sense of reality. Now Higgins (Victories, etc., etc.) has written a novel that's virtually nothing but digressions—the fable of Achilles and the tortoise narrated by a South Boston Beckett. Sgt. Harry Dell'Appa's been recalled from banishment in the wilds of Massachusetts to join Sgt. Bob Brennan in watching Short Joey Mossi, a mob exterminator of lowlifes. Brennan, who knows everything there is to know about Joey and everything else, regales Harry with stories about who Joey killed when, how Joey's retarded brother Danny became untouchable, why Brennan's own well-heeled brother Doug is such a wuss, and how Joey's regular habits mirror those of chop-shop cuckold Buddy Royal, who just can't stop swiping high-end cars. As the stream of stories becomes a torrent, though—amplified largely through Harry's conversations about Brennan with his wife Gayle and his boss Lt. Brian Dennison (the Great Den Mother)—Harry begins to wonder why Brennan, who's gotten the goods on Joey long since, doesn't just take him in. Gradually the novel becomes a stately dance of distance, since just as he keeps Harry at arm's length by running off at the mouth, Brennan's evidently been following Joey for years without ever wanting to catch up with him. (The moment when Harry does catch up with Joey- -practically the only event in this balletic novel—is priceless.) Yet there's a logical explanation for Brennan's behavior, too, hidden, as you'd expect, deep inside the husk of all those anecdotes—an explanation that bears out the universal rule of Dennison's legendary predecessor Bomber Lawrence: You always do it for the money. This may be the ultimate Higgins novel. The author's ability to tease an entire plot out of a series of delaying tactics—and to provide a satisfying ending for what seemed at first like an entire meal of gooey desserts—is nothing short of amazing.
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1993
ISBN: 0-8050-2329-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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