Trading the Jersey suburbs of her acclaimed debut, After Moondog (1992), for the brownstones of Brooklyn, Shapiro outdoes herself to pull off an absorbing black comedy again featuring an excruciatingly muddled marriage. Here, though, as far as the bewildered bride is concerned, it’s one that quickly winds up like being on death row with every appeal exhausted. When they meet at a Manhattan dinner party, the chemistry is perfect: she (nameless) is a lonely photographer struggling to make ends meet; he, Dennis, a recently fired sociologist now working on a novel, is lonely, too—but rich. So they move in together in his brownstone and soon marry. Her photographic chronicle of the early days shows the usual blissful postcoital images, but as weeks turn into months, bruises and bandages begin to appear on both of them, and the daily routine outside the frame increasingly comes to resemble a nightmare. More than clumsy, more than messy, more than weird—more than terrifying—Dennis’s every movement leaves wreckage in its wake. In response, his spouse tries first to deny, then to cope, to no avail. When Dennis accidentally drops an iron skillet on her big toe, putting her on crutches and costing her an out-of-town photo assignment, she begins to think in terms of self-defense. By chance, she soon runs across a novelist moonlighting as a hit man, and makes arrangements to put Dennis out of her misery. She can’t go through with it, though, and so runs away instead, taking his pet albino frog with her. Lonely again, she goes back home after a week, but matters get only worse: first, the frog, then the cat, then the dog meet untimely ends, and when Dennis breaks her arm she knows with chilling certainty that it’s finally come down to her or him. Such goings-on have rarely been so outrageously, horribly funny and yet so eerily familiar: this is writing at its most nuanced and exquisite. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-316-78247-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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