A colorful, nuanced novel about a golfer, his family and his choices.
PGA golfer Charlie Matthias drops out of the circuit and moves back to his hometown in this novel about his dysfunctional family and his own life crisis.
It’s Christmastime, and 33-year-old Charlie Matthias is back living at his childhood home in an affluent Chicago suburb. He just left the PGA circuit, where he’d made money and reached midlevel success. Now, he’s questioning his life. He kicked his cocaine problem two years ago, but his wife, hometown beauty Kathleen, finally divorced him and married a rich lawyer; they just had a child. Charlie feels disconnected from his family, which includes his golf-fanatic father, who pushed Charlie into his pro career; his subservient mother, who allows herself to be ruled by Charlie’s class-conscious father; and his twin, anorexic sisters, who live together, with one of them, newly pregnant, married to crass businessman Nip. Charlie’s most drawn to his feisty grandmother, however. His sense of isolation changes when, swerving and crying while driving through Chicago, he meets up again with Erica Denner, a childhood classmate whose family now owns and lives in an apartment building in a German neighborhood. He moves into the building and is exposed to Erica’s bohemian world. They get involved, but then events unfold—with his grandmother, his father, his agent and, most significantly, Kathleen—to complicate his possible new life course. Author Wittmann effectively captures Charlie’s somewhat privileged angst, with the depiction of golf fever at the country club being at times especially amusing. Surprisingly, however, Charlie’s own relationship with the game remains murky, despite emphasis on the fact that he shares a birthday with fellow (and real-life) late bloomer Phil Mickelson. Also featured are a couple of broad strokes in plot development, including a rather extreme incident bringing Kathleen back into the picture and a sexual escapade that seems out of sync for sardonic but sensitive Charlie. Still, Wittmann admirably doesn’t “solve” all of Charlie’s problems, instead making the point that sometimes in life, you simply play through.
A colorful, nuanced novel about a golfer, his family and his choices.Pub Date: March 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-1483907222
Page Count: 294
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2013
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
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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