An entertaining drama that reaffirms the familiar adage that family and business don’t mix.
In Claud’s debut, a matriarch’s death triggers petty rivalries in a family business.
Even before Ward Mills CEO Dolly Ward passes away from cancer in 1988, Ted Brunson knows that the sun is slowly setting on the textile industry. For years, the family business in South Carolina has held its own among the “Big Five,” but global changes in the textile trade are slowly hitting home. Ted sees that the time has come for the company to be sold; the problem is that he’s an outsider, a Ward by marriage only. Although he’s the heir apparent to Dolly’s position, he might not have enough support from family board members who have other plans for the company. (The son of modest hardware-store owners, Ted is the titular “Dancin’ Man—a metaphorical toy easily manipulated by external circumstances.) To compound the situation, his marriage to Virginia Ward, Dolly’s only daughter, is on the rocks. Virginia also struggles as she tries to make peace with her past, including a strained mother-daughter relationship. Ted’s college friend, Virginia’s brother Sam, is about the only person who’s firmly on his side; years ago, Sam ignored Ted’s lack of blue blood and inducted his future brother-in-law to South Carolina high society. An assortment of other family members, including two Ward brothers that form part of the family’s “Atlanta contingent,” rounds out the cast. Claud’s descriptions of sprawling horse farms, languorous summer evenings and glimpses of Southern wealth (“The lawn rolled out before Ted glowing with the same emerald intensity as the fairways of the Fort Hill Country Club”) add delightful touches to this fast-paced narrative. Yet the story’s tight arc leaves some elements underexplored; it’s never clear, for example, what happens to Ted’s parents after he’s assimilated into the Ward clan. Also, an element of family scandal thrown in at the very end comes across as a tad disjointed and out of place. Nevertheless, this novel about the end of a way of life often makes for transporting reading.
An entertaining drama that reaffirms the familiar adage that family and business don’t mix.Pub Date: March 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0988416499
Page Count: 282
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2014
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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