Leimbach follows her very successful debut (Dying Young, 1989, which had another life as a 1991 movie) with this lackluster story of frayed family ties. The Haskells, a Massachusetts family, split up when the father dies. Mother and daughter move to Los Angeles while 25-year-old Sam, our narrator, pursues his career in Boston (he manages musical acts) and rejoices that manic-depressive Lois and silly adolescent Ginny are off his hands. Four years later, when the story proper begins, Sam goes out to L.A. for the first time; selfish as ever, he's going for business reasons first, a family reunion second. That reunion is tricky; he must start over with Ginny, who has gone from girl to woman (a moody, tense, fiercely independent woman), and tread carefully around Lois, quite at sea without a caring spouse to supervise her pill-taking. Then, impatiently, Leimbach gives up on this family scene (banishing Lois to Oregon with her lover Van, a corpulent ex-lunatic loathed by Ginny) and wings it from page to page with the help of three new characters: Eli, the owner of a trendy Hollywood restaurant and upscale strip-joint; Eli's sleazy business partner Mikey; and Mikey's beautiful wife, Lucy. Sam learns slowly that Ginny (ostensibly just a waitress in the restaurant) is both Eli's woman and the designer of the strippers' costumes. Scarcely has this sunk in when Eli is electrocuted in his hot tub: accident? murder? Sam goes around and around this question (he never finds out for sure), while making love to Lucy, fending off the madly jealous Mikey, and (in his few calm moments) learning he can no longer play big brother to Ginny. The weak narrative grip, the awkward shifts and dislocations, the bland narrator, and the capricious removal of the most interesting character, the richly ambiguous Eli: all make this a disappointing second offering.
Pub Date: April 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-385-42255-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1992
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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