A pleasant digression through the back streets, though served up with a bit more nostalgia than may be good for you.
A neighborhood mosaic by the prolific Chicago novelist (Ghost of the Sun, 1990, etc.).
Petrakis’s tenth novel re-creates the atmosphere of the Windy City’s Greek Town through the eyes of local restaurateur and family man Orestes Panos. Orestes has seen a lot of change in his day. Just 50, he has lived all his life in Greek Town, where he runs a restaurant, the Olympia, that serves as a kind of townsquare for the locals who invariably pass through at some point each day. There’s the journalist Ted Banapoulos, Karvelas the undertaker; Orestes’s physician Dr. Savas; his parish priest Fr. Anton, and the nouveau riche meatpacker Sam Tzangaris. Happily married for 23 years, Orestes loves his wife Dessie but is beginning to chafe under the constraints of domestic life. For one thing, his odious mother-in-law Stavroula has recently moved in; for another, his teenaged daughter Marika is bleeding him dry with her shopping sprees. Orestes’s son Paulie is thinking of walking out of the shotgun marriage that his young wife’s family pushed him into the year before, and Paulie’s doubts are giving Orestes ideas of his own. When he meets Sarah Fleming, a young artist who lived in Crete for a while and shares Orestes’s passion for Kazantzakis, Orestes is at first intrigued, then smitten, and finally obsessed. Is this a belated case of the seven-year itch? Whatever it is, it soon takes on a life of its own and infects Orestes with massive pangs of guilt. Too bad he doesn’t know that Dessie has a few secrets of her own. And, in the meantime, Orestes has to find a way of clearing Fr. Anton of the false charges of pedophilia brought against him by the odious Sam Tzangaris. Just another day in the neighborhood.
A pleasant digression through the back streets, though served up with a bit more nostalgia than may be good for you.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2004
ISBN: 0-8093-2578-0
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Southern Illinois Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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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