A mortality-haunted medical sci-fi tale that offers a life-affirming diagnosis.
In Griffin’s debut novel, four diverse Long Islanders learn that they’re all fated to die on Christmas Day due to a troubling medical “breakthrough.”
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a cutting-edge research lab, announces an amazing discovery that’s connected to the Human Genome Project. A gene labeled p63A can apparently predict with unerring accuracy the dates of death for a monitored group of human subjects. Eerily, even if ill health isn’t a factor, death inevitably strikes the subjects on the predicted calendar date—due to accident, suicide or even murder. The media uproar that follows comes mostly from the religious community, which accuses the scientists of trying to dethrone God. Doctors, meanwhile, are intrigued and scrutinize the phenomena further. Four Long Islanders in the study group, who seemingly have no other direct connections, all come up in test results as destined to die in exactly one year, on Dec. 25, 2013. The condemned include Dan Brannigan, a superrich stock trader with shady deals in his past, who helped fund Cold Spring Harbor; Janet, a suburban wife and worried mother of a man fighting in Afghanistan; Sharona, a 27-year-old African-American woman struggling with an unreliable ex-con boyfriend; and Father Ted, a serious-minded clergyman, wounded in mind and body because of his service in Operation Desert Storm. As scientists monitor each patient, looking for signs of a sinister pattern, the novel counts down the months and weeks to the quartet’s seemingly unavoidable fate. The story’s premise may initially recall the Final Destination horror-film series, but it quickly turns 180 degrees from the juvenile-gore route. Its overall tone is not unlike those of such popular romance tales as Danielle Steel’s Amazing Grace (2007) or Maeve Binchy’s Nights of Rain and Stars (2004); as in those books, an ensemble cast brought together by happenstance undergoes a trauma, and readers eavesdrop on how each character copes in the aftermath. The resolution, which channels metaphysics, the paranormal and biochemistry, is not only satisfying, but also has a graceful sense of science apprehending the Almighty (or the nearest equivalent) without ever getting overly mawkish or preachy. Griffin, in an afterword, states that he pondered his material for more than 20 years before writing the novel, but it rarely feels forced or overpolished.
A mortality-haunted medical sci-fi tale that offers a life-affirming diagnosis.Pub Date: March 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1478724230
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Outskirts Press Inc.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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
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
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