Excellent work by a self-described “overnight success” who’s spent the past 40 years trying to get a novel published.
The adventures of a young lieutenant in the post–Civil War army are balanced with his sweet private life—in a debut from a Kansas-based professor near retirement age.
Lt. Michael Crofton’s young career takes him from Little Big Horn to the Zulu wars in South Africa via London and revolutionary Cuba, bringing onstage the likes of Rutherford Hayes and William Tecumseh Sherman, but there is neither grandiosity nor bombast. Coplin’s tone is so artfully unassuming and his hero, a West Point graduate from a prosperous Rhode Island family, is so genuinely modest that time flies dreamily in a tale that ends long before Crofton has worn out his welcome. And it all seems possible. As Coplin reminds us, the army in the 1870s had shrunk to 25,000, and Washington was still a small city, so the operators of the national machinery were just down the street. The very likable young Lt. Crofton’s story begins with his fortunate escape from the carnage at the detested General Custer’s last stand followed by his failure to dodge a bullet from the derringer in the hand of the breathtakingly pretty and young whore he will marry upon recovery. Leaving the skillfully sketched frontier, Crofton puts in purgatorial time sorting through army supplies with politically wired Lt. Sorenson. Sorenson’s congressional connections put the young men into the thick of an unsanctioned, possibly presidential plot to meddle in the outcome of Cuban revolutionary activities—a plot that ends as inconclusively as all Cuban plots tend to. More purgatory follows, this time in the national cemetery, and then it’s off to England through the worst of winter on a clipper ship, followed by a stint with the King’s Guards and a suicidal stand against the Zulus. As the adventures pile up, Crofton pines for his sweet young family. None of this is new, really, but it is all so fresh as narrated by the superbly modest soldier that it seems like—well—life.
Excellent work by a self-described “overnight success” who’s spent the past 40 years trying to get a novel published.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-399-15112-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
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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