Sonia is hard to care about, so her arguments pro and con baby–raising carry less weight than they should.
A Brooklyn woman flips out when she discovers she’s pregnant with her third child in this first novel by Bomer, whose previous short story collection (Baby and Other Stories, 2010) took a steely-eyed, unromantic view of motherhood.
As the novel opens, Sonia is about to give birth to her third baby, alone in a hospital in Philadelphia. Flash back eight months. Sonia is a bourgeois yet hip (if that’s not an oxymoron?) wife and mother who has put aside her ambitions as a painter for the time being in order to care for 4-year-old Tom and 2-year-old Michael. She doesn’t have to work because husband Dick, a hazily drawn nice guy, earns a good living doing some kind of worthwhile research. Now that the boys are old enough for pre-school, Sonia is thinking about starting to paint again. And, no longer overwhelmed by the exhaustion of caring for small babies, she and Dick have rekindled their sexual relationship. The ironic result is Sonia’s unexpected, unwanted pregnancy. Sonia has never been exactly in love with being a mommy, but she doesn’t want the responsibility of choosing to terminate. Pregnancy only exaggerates a propensity toward self-absorption as she and Dick dither away the first trimester arguing but not deciding whether to abort. Meanwhile, Sonia ’s ambivalence toward Brooklyn itself increases. She has diminishing patience with parenting peer pressure—the emphasis on nutrition, on finding the perfect school, on making sure one’s child is properly diagnosed for trendy learning and social disorders. But, a Brooklyn cultural snob, she suffers a panic attack while house hunting in the suburbs. Finally, toward the end of her second trimester, Sonia snaps. Leaving the boys with long-suffering Dick, she heads off in her car. For the talky last trimester of the novel she revisits not only the people and places of her past, but also her pre-marriage persona to ready herself for permanent adulthood.
Sonia is hard to care about, so her arguments pro and con baby–raising carry less weight than they should.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61695-146-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
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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