The first-person voice in this endearingly quirky first novel is so entertaining that it makes up for a lack of transformation on the part of the main characters. Two Washington, DC, residents—landscape architect Jack and artist Nina—break up after living together for several years and one year after chickening out of marriage. Nina leaves Jack for no apparent reason, unless `` `God was sending me a message' '' counts as one. Nina's Italian-American family attempts to intervene, especially her mother, Marie, who informs Jack that Nina has begun seeing an uptight Jewish lawyer who happens to play in Jack's basketball league. Jack's sister Ellen also gets into the act, fixing him up with a divorced SEC lawyer who is so well-adjusted that she seems almost automated. Narrator Jack tells of the pain of their split, making parallels between his beloved operas and his own plight, as well as of his adventures as a single guy, with a tongue-in-cheek slant that makes even the mundane interesting. ``Proper male bonding demands an activity—preferably one involving a ball—to shift the focus from the conversation. You break the news about your impending divorce to your best friend at a batting cage, discuss your father's rapidly failing memory with your brother at putt-putt.'' Washington and its environs are also well drawn. A building sits ``in the heart of new Bethesda, a sterile canyonland of white concrete and red brick that overlays a town I used to love....I miss the human scale of old Bethesda, the smelly dumpsters and shaggy willows and warrens of alleys and ten-car parking lots.'' Ackerman takes some easy but amusing shots at therapy: Nina's new love interest has scheduled screaming sessions with his mother, and Jack's latest lover discusses all sexual details with a therapist. While the book works as a close examination of '90s social angst, Jack and Nina's breakup never seems genuine—especially for such basically earthy characters. A tour of one man's life, with little action but first-rate scenery and commentary.
Pub Date: May 16, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11037-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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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