There aren’t many surprises in the collection, but there are no disappointments, either. Essential for students of...
The esteemed literary award volume returns for another installment, full, as ever, of exemplary short fiction.
Money can make a fellow murderous, especially when that fellow has come from out of nowhere—say, Jay Gatsby—and sort of fell into what he found to be a pretty nice way to pass the time, being rich and all. Or maybe it was something else: “I told you, that guy might have been successful but he wasn't quite right up there, he’d been in Tiananmen, maybe it messed up his head.” So writes Tash Aw, a Malaysian novelist long resident in London, in his illuminating story “Sail,” psychologically dense and strange enough to be memorable, not to mention beautifully written. Published in A Public Space, Aw’s story comes from among the least-known authors and venues in this collection. Others are the usual suspects, published in places such as the New Yorker, Tin House and the Kenyon Review: Andrea Barrett, Alice Munro, Ann Beattie, Donald Antrim. Elite status is no hindrance; this isn’t the Pushcart Prize, with at least half an eye out for nurturing newcomers, but instead, as good a picture of the state of the art of short story writing as there is. Munro’s story, for instance, published not long before she announced that she was retiring from writing, is an evocation of a past when “there was a movie theatre in every town” and people didn’t think to lock their doors at night; it being Munro, though, that past harbors its own secrets, some of them quite disturbing. Other stories are meta-referential without being archly so; Beattie, for example, does a nice bit of intergenerational banter on the large topic of anecdote, while Ruth Prawer Jhabvala slyly opens her contribution with, “Kishen’s university friends at Cambridge completely understood when he talked to them about the sort of novel that should be written about India—the sort of novel that he wanted to write.”
There aren’t many surprises in the collection, but there are no disappointments, either. Essential for students of contemporary fiction.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-345-80325-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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