Slavin’s efforts to undercut the reader’s sense of equilibrium are arresting for a bit, then persistently off-putting. In...
A mythological Bigfoot-ish creature terrorizes Washington, D.C., in an absurdist fable that veers from the intriguingly eccentric to the precious.
First-novelist Slavin (stories: The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club, 1999) is best delineating the angst of Dylan Dunleavy, 14, whose body changes get him fired after three glorious seasons as the voice of a rodent called Harlan on a wildly popular animated TV show (“the job every kid in America wanted”). But nothing can stop Dylan’s voice from growing too low for the boy-rat Harlan, and, once ousted by Gold Street, Dylan feels the full weight of his loneliness. He lives with his protective, chin-up mother, Wendy, in a depressing housing complex in Washington, while his father, Congressman Matt, does time at Ainsville prison for shadiness. Grisly murders have been taking place, and, in his delusional grief (perhaps), Dylan spots the Chewy-like monster, called a chagwa, which seems to have sprung from the deepest recesses of man’s subconscious. Soon, the chagwa is sighted everywhere, large, hairy and voracious for steak, though no one seems able to shoot it. In alternate viewpoints, the surreal plight of Wendy and Dylan becomes apparent: stabilized on Solisan, a drug everyone takes, Wendy bids goodbye to her occasional affair, Peter, who is moving with his family to the historical enactment camp Colonial World, where there’s war with the Croatans and an outbreak of influenza. Wendy flirts with dishy political impresario Ben Sotterburg and entertains her husband at home for occasional, edgy furloughs from jail, while Dylan grows more depressed and isolated, the chagwa more restless and hungry and Wendy more nutty and unstable—until the whole city seems to erupt in paranoia.
Slavin’s efforts to undercut the reader’s sense of equilibrium are arresting for a bit, then persistently off-putting. In all, sparks of high goof and a lot of nonsense filler.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-393-05998-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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