Browner (whose translations include, most recently, CÇline: A Biography, p. 244) delivers a refreshingly comic and original first novel featuring the obsessive love of a well-to-do New Yorker for the mythical monster he corrupts. Young, rich, and bored with the aimlessness of his life since the death of his heiress wife, Aaron X wanders idly one day into the Museum of Modern Art in Paris to find himself transfixed by an unusual sculpture. The work, entitled Conglomeros, depicts a surreal-looking monster with three gracefully pubescent, humanlike torsos—two male and one female—connected at the neck to one doe- eyed, embryonic head. Captivated by this image, Aaron remembers suddenly that his grandfather once noted actually having seen such a creature in Romania's Carpathian Mountains. Aaron departs for Romania posthaste, soon finds the creature—still as trusting, immaculate, and irresistible as the artist had portrayed it—and smuggles it back to his rural New York estate. As Aaron soon discovers, however, the ageless Conglomeros exhibits a frightening zeal for the most regrettable aspects of modern life. Spurred on by such soul-destroyers as The New York Times and The Twilight Zone, the creature soon tires of its isolated existence and convinces Aaron to introduce it to New York. Within weeks after their move, the overstimulated monster, confined to a wheelchair in its disguise as a disabled old woman, has changed its name to ``Connie'' and run off with an East Village charlatan to head a religious cult. Aaron has learned his lesson—but too late: Innocence once lost is not easily recaptured—and all who have conspired in Connie's corruption must suffer in the end. Bits of Lolita, Frankenstein, and any number of child-care manuals float freely through this savory stew—a captivating modern-day satire by an entertaining new writer.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-679-40879-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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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