Giddy, gaudy, inventive, slapdash satire. Loads of fun, often over-the-top, yet in its way as simple and earnest as On the...
Pop-culture maven and Entertainment Weekly editor Gaslin pours it all into his first novel, a frenetic and trippy consumerist vision of America.
BeemerTM Minutia grew up in a series of small cities, indistinguishable from one another, soaking up the mass culture of the ’80s. His schedule for making BeemerTM a global brand is in place before he leaves high school. By age 25, he’s made a small splash as a youth-consultant to corporations, known for living in a car while remaining plugged into the mediasphere. Beemer loves and embraces the excesses of America, the beauty of newerfastershinierbigger, while best/only friend, James Dean–like Stamp, quests for the authentic thing, pursuing a trucker/factory-worker/cowboy lifestyle, making himself out of pieces of America’s past every bit as synthetic as Beemer’s beloved future. Beemer’s girlfriend, lovely and ruthless Paul E. Klein, even more ambitious than Beemer, demands that he join “Regularland.” So Beemer gets a job and moves into a basement room in her family’s typical southern California home; in the next room, Paul’s mysterious genius brother, 13-year-old Young Brandon Tartikoff, plays intriguing but unseen video games when not out with his scary teenage crew. While Beemer works on pure advertising—product is irrelevant, manipulation the point—on the secret floor of a powerful agency, Paul’s management client, the ultimate nonthreatening boy band Eunuch-Town, is on-site when a mall is blown up by teenage anticonsumerist terrorists led by her brother, and she uses the media spotlight to turn the band into the number-one entertainment commodity. When Paul leaves for a world tour, Beemer confronts her brother and learns that his own fear that the next generation has left him behind is true: So Beemer leaves the world altogether to become a desert hermit who’ll wait until the world finds him and makes him the next big thing.
Giddy, gaudy, inventive, slapdash satire. Loads of fun, often over-the-top, yet in its way as simple and earnest as On the Road.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-56947-329-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
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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