After winning the Booker Prixe for his last novel, an inspired satire on aging adulterers (The Old Devils), Amis here aims his barbed wit at an easy target—the cultural excesses of the Sixties. It's not just radical chic and open marriage that Amis mocks in this rather tired fiction. He's still griping about long hair and mod fashion! In any case, the more immediate dilemma—the problem set out in the title—affects Patrick Standish, a former Latin teacher, now working for the trendy publishing firm of Hammond and Sutcliffe, whose list of authors provides Patrick with much to grump about. The poets are insufferable bores, the novelists mostly illiterate boobs. But Patrick is himself something of a fool. Despite being married to a woman of great beauty and solid character, he still chases skirts with reckless abandon. His loyal wife, Jenny, childless after seven years of marriage, suffers her husband's satyriasis with a stiff upper lip, even when she should send him packing. Although their marital warfare takes up much of this rambling narrative, there are others here with "girl" problems. There's Tim Valentine, a mysterious new neighbor who has been convinced by his pompous shrink that his premature ejaculations indicate deep-rooted homosexuality, a theory he wants to explore in his new digs. There's Simon Giles, Patrick's boss, who hopes to control his wife's sexual wanderlust by setting her up with Patrick. There's Patrick's other neighbor, Eric, a demure homosexual who puts up with his shrill and feminine love, a former actor with a taste for sordid melodrama—he's referred to as "she" throughout in order to stress the commonality of their discord. This subplot about the "incredibly nasty and incredibly dangerous" world of homosexuality is intended, amazingly enough, as an argument against the decriminalization of homosexual acts—legislation that passed back in the time during which the novel is set. Patrick's chastening, meanwhile, results from a predictable plot device—Jenny finally manages to get pregnant. With great comedic skill, Amis highlights the disparity between what characters say and what they think. But here bis talents are wasted on a dull sex farce that resolves itself with much cheap moralizing.
Pub Date: April 5, 1989
ISBN: 0517063190
Page Count: -
Publisher: Summit/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1989
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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