Complex, assured stories that describe the complications of love and need with perfect pitch.
These well-observed short stories describe sometimes-uneasy, sometimes-hopeful reconciliations with fortune.
Most of the 24 short stories in this collection previously appeared in literary journals; some have been altered slightly for this publication. In the title story—which captures a mood underlying many in the collection—an unnamed couple’s road to marriage begins with adopting a pug and proceeds from there like some blandly idyllic TV montage: they walk the dog, name him Prince, and enjoy his excited jumping up and down; they get corporate jobs, plan a small wedding, and have the ceremony in a park gazebo. When disaster upends them, Prince has a new home, “but he would never jump up and down. Instead, he would…spend his every night at the door, waiting, unable to believe in fate.” Named or unnamed, male or female, young or old, the characters in these stories struggle more or less successfully to believe in their fates. Sometimes, as in “The Driver,” rhythms of marriage and friendship ease the process. Maggie accompanies her second husband, Frank—20 years her senior—to the Department of Motor Vehicles, where he fails a vision test. Afterward, they bicker on a safe topic—“I’ll be damned if I’m going to Bob Evans”—until “the discomfort of Frank’s new reality dissolved.” The car’s engine, like their marriage, settles, after an initial kick, “into a comfortable hum.” The stories are arranged well to bring similar themes together: parents, children, and siblings; addicts, criminals, and twelve-steppers; workplaces; disasters, natural and otherwise. In many passages, Knox (Don’t Tease the Elephants, 2014, etc.) displays a keen pithiness: the pug’s “bunched face,” an old man’s insight about the ruthlessness shared by CEOs and addicts: “You got the really out and out and the really up and up, and they’re both the same kind of fucked up. That’s why they hate each other so much.”
Complex, assured stories that describe the complications of love and need with perfect pitch.Pub Date: May 31, 2015
ISBN: 978-1495106125
Page Count: 185
Publisher: Rain Mountain Press
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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