An over-the-top-comedy in which the veteran wildman of redneck fiction (Scar Lover, 1992, etc.) casts his satirical eye on the all-American world of door-to-door sales. As the title suggests, Crews aspires to the same level of social criticism as Arthur Miller, Sinclair Lewis, et al., but his vision is blurred by his obsessive interest in the disgusting and grotesque. For 25 years, Hickum Looney has sold the most products for the Soaps For Life company, a record exceeded only by the Boss himself, a snaggle-toothed maniac with a harelip who promises salvation through his crappy soap products and has amassed a fortune doing it. Hickum, based in Miami, leads the properly anonymous existence of a company man, but everything changes when two females come into his lonely life. Ida Mae, an old woman abandoned by her husband, helps Hickum sell more products in a single day than anyone else has ever sold. This has incredible repercussions at the home office in Atlanta, where the Boss sees his worldview challenged. Meanwhile, Gaye Nell Odell, a young ex- prostitute, along with her vicious pit bull, Bubba, shoves her way into Hickum's solitary life. She and the equally ``rank and randy'' Ida Mae help Hickum overcome such embarrassments as chronic diarrhea and insecurity about his ``little raggedy ass Vienna sausage'' of a penis. The Boss has his own problems: his chauffeur, an ex-con who's tired of being booted in the butt; and his trainer, who suffers similar physical abuse for the money. The two are plotting revenge when the entire crew is sidetracked by an even stranger plot involving a major company shakeup and the fulfillment of a long-held rumor concerning the fate of ousted employees. A roller-coaster-ride of a novel, ``neck deep in crazy,'' that eventually drowns in ridiculousness: Crews reaches too far in his conspiratorial lunacya very '60s gestureand spoils an otherwise funny book.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80934-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
Back to a Jurassic Park sideshow for another immensely entertaining adventure, this fashioned from the loose ends of Crichton's 1990 bestseller. Six years after the lethal rampage that closed the primordial zoo offshore Costa Rica, there are reports of strange beasts in widely separated Central American venues. Intrigued by the rumors, Richard Levine, a brilliant but arrogant paleontologist, goes in search of what he hopes will prove a lost world. Aided by state-of- the-art equipment, Levine finds a likely Costa Rican outpostbut quickly comes to grief, having disregarded the warnings of mathematician Ian Malcolm (the sequel's only holdover character). Malcolm and engineer Doc Thorne organize a rescue mission whose ranks include mechanical whiz Eddie Carr and Sarah Harding, a biologist doing fieldwork with predatory mammals in East Africa. The party of four is unexpectedly augmented by two children, Kelly Curtis, a 13-year-old "brainer," and Arby Benton, a black computer genius, age 11. Once on the coastal island, the deliverance crew soon links up with an unchastened Levine and locates the hush-hush genetics lab complex used to stock the ill- fated Jurassic Park with triceratops, tyrannosaurs, velociraptors, etc. Meanwhile, a mad amoral scientist and his own group, in pursuit of extinct creatures for biotech experiments, have also landed on the mysterious island. As it turns out, the prehistoric fauna is hostile to outsiders, and so the good guys as well as their malefic counterparts spend considerable time running through the triple-canopy jungle in justifiable terror. The far-from-dumb brutes exact a gruesomely heavy toll before the infinitely resourceful white-hat interlopers make their final breakout. Pell-mell action and hairbreadth escapes, plus periodic commentary on the uses and abuses of science: the admirable Crichton keeps the pot boiling throughout.
Pub Date: Sept. 28, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41946-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
In part a perfectly paced mystery story, in part an Indian Wuthering Heights: a gorgeous and seductive fever dream of a...
A brilliantly constructed first novel that untangles an intricate web of sexual and caste conflict in a vivid style reminiscent of Salman Rushdie's early work.
The major characters are Estha and Rahel, the fraternal twin son and daughter of a wealthy family living in the province of Kerala. The family's prosperity is derived from a pickle factory and rubber estate, and their prideful Anglophilia essentially estranges them from their country's drift toward Communism and their ``inferiors' '' hunger for independence and equality. The events of a crucial December day in 1969—including an accidental death that may have been no accident and the violent consequences that afflict an illicit couple who have broken "the Love Law''—are the moral and narrative center around which the episodes of the novel repeatedly circle. Shifting backward and forward in time with effortless grace, Roy fashions a compelling nexus of personalities that influence the twins' "eerie stealth'' and furtive interdependence. These include their beautiful and mysteriously remote mother Ammu; her battling "Mammachi'' (who runs the pickle factory) and "Pappachi'' (an insufficiently renowned entomologist); their Oxford-educated Marxist Uncle Chacko and their wily "grandaunt'' Baby Kochamma; and the volatile laborite "Untouchable'' Velutha, whose relationship with the twins' family will prove his undoing. Roy conveys their explosive commingling in a vigorous prose dominated by odd syntactical and verbal combinations and coinages (a bad dream experience during midday nap-time is an "aftermare'') reminiscent of Gerard Manly Hopkins's "sprung rhythm,'' incantatory repetitions, striking metaphors (Velutha is seen ``standing in the shade of the rubber trees with coins of sunshine dancing on his body'') and sensuous descriptive passages (``The sky was orange, and the coconut trees were sea anemones waving their tentacles, hoping to trap and eat an unsuspecting cloud'').
In part a perfectly paced mystery story, in part an Indian Wuthering Heights: a gorgeous and seductive fever dream of a novel, and a truly spectacular debut. (First serial to Granta)Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-45731-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
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