A taxing text, but readers prepared to do the work will find some grand and gripping concepts here.
A war erupts on a heaven-like planet and spills over to Earth, embroiling a cast of characters in the desperate birth of a new age for mankind.
Early on in Lavanway’s complex, problematic work, a main character has a dream. When he wakes, he finds the dividing line between dreaming and waking disturbingly blurred: “It had been going on before I dreamed it, and it had continued after I awoke.” Readers who grapple with Lavanway’s dense, incantatory prose for more than a few chapters will feel the same way: the threads of his narrative are often completely lost in the profuse detail of his imagined alternate reality—but the ultimate sensation also has some of the good qualities of being trapped inside a dream. On one surface level, this is a very old story of rebellion in Heaven. In the perfect alien world of Antecedeon, all is peace and harmony among its older and wiser inhabitants, when gradually younger spirits, dubbing themselves the New Order, grow impatient with the perfection all around them (and with Antecedeon’s wise and benevolent solitary male patriarch—no explanation is offered why a perfect world would need such an anachronistic feature). As the New Order spreads its resistance across space and dimensions to Earth, a story evolves that is both evocatively detailed and maddeningly vague. Lavanway has the courage to envision what seems at first to be an entire cosmology, and that’s no small undertaking. He has a vigorous talent for description, which is often pitted against sentences such as, “One of the main reasons behind the World Order’s campaign to bring immortality and immersive interconnectivity to the global population was to preserve the World Order’s bank of human assets and ensure control over the human resource pool upon which the World Order elites floated.” The work shares the apocalyptic, phantasmal sensibility of the biblical book of Revelation, and includes a section at the end citing specific religious passages that inspired much of the story.
A taxing text, but readers prepared to do the work will find some grand and gripping concepts here.Pub Date: May 24, 2010
ISBN: 978-0976800439
Page Count: 408
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
