An intriguing, if uneven, debut.
Eighteen stories that flirt with both psychological horror and philosophical speculation through the unremitting setting of the ordinary life.
Fulham-McQuillan’s debut collection introduces the reader to a cast of hapless characters embroiled in situations that are increasingly difficult to define. In the title story, the speaker is a documentary filmmaker exalting in the singular opportunity to film Jackson, a former conductor beset by a sort of viral existentialism that results in all his past selves manifesting as corpses in the wake of his every movement. In “whiteroom” a man and his late wife have reduced their lives to the eternal simplicity of their pure white room in order to enter into a fraught immortality of the mind. In “A Tourist,” a man attracted by the memory of himself standing in a place before it fell to ruin “[visits] the grief of his past,” setting up camp in a desolate valley where he is haunted by a duo of shadowy others who attempt both communication and violence. To call these stories heady is an understatement of both their intent and form. Deeply influenced by continental philosophy (Kierkegaard is mentioned, Lacan is evoked, Simone Weil is quoted), the book also plays with the formal influence of Poe’s sensual grotesques, Dostoevsky’s tormented psychological realism, Borges' cerebral mythos. The results are ambitious and uneven. In “Winter Guests,” for example, the staff of a resort in the off-season report on the mounting tensions between a single guest and the beautiful female caretaker of a wheelchair-bound and totally bandaged patient. The story is haunting, suspenseful, and intricately detailed. Its philosophy lingers in the realization of its characters; its unanswerable questions rise organically from the setting of the winter seashore and the isolation of the nearly empty hotel. Other stories, however, are less successful and overwhelm the reader with their insistence on mingling Poe’s obsessive stylings with a more contemporary cynicism—or perhaps late-20th-century mass-produced weariness—reminiscent of Beckett or Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud. These influences make for an uneasy pairing, one whose tremendous potential is sometimes buried beneath a miasmic stylistic expression.
An intriguing, if uneven, debut.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-6287-287-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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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