The noir formula readily accommodates Sallis’ mannered dialogue. Even so, most readers will feel a jarring split between the...
Just in time for fans of the Ryan Gosling film adaptation, the further adventures of Driver (Drive, 2005).
He’s been calling himself Paul West for seven years. That’s the name by which his fiancée, Elsa Jorgenson, knew him when she died, killed by a pair of goons Driver swiftly dispatched. But everyone outside Elsa’s family (“we are your family,” her father mournfully tells him) still calls him Driver. It’s presumably Driver, not Paul West, that the men sent to follow him are interested in. Acquiring an innocuous-looking Fairlane 500 and tweaking its engine, Driver begins to make more and more adventurous forays outside Phoenix, where he’s settled. He shares portentous conversations with his hardheaded buddy Felix and his screenwriter friend Manny. He hooks up with law student Stephanie Cooper, whose ex-cop father Bill is sitting in a nursing home indulging in even more cryptic exchanges with ex–Special Forces visitor Wendell. He takes a meeting with self-anointed problem solver James Beil, who hints that Driver’s problems may be closely akin to his own. He works his way up the food chain to post-Katrina carpetbagger Gerald Dunaway and big wolf Bennie Capel in a search for whoever’s sent the interchangeable guys who’ve been dogging his tracks. All the while, Sallis (The Killer Is Dying, 2011, etc.) is using his mouthpieces to dispense nonstop nuggets of existential wisdom (“We think we make choices. But what happens is the choices walk up, stand face to face with us, and stare us down”) that both prepare and compensate for the inconclusiveness of the plot.
The noir formula readily accommodates Sallis’ mannered dialogue. Even so, most readers will feel a jarring split between the ostensibly thrilling tale and the downbeat commonplaces that punctuate it, or vice versa.Pub Date: April 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4642-0010-6
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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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