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On the Brink: A Trio of Genres

A varied trilogy of beautifully described prose pieces, some more esoteric than others.

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Three fiction pieces by author Fitzell track a monk seeking ultimate truth in cyberspace, a fashion model’s surreal life, and a spinster teacher’s traumatic pilgrimage to Ireland.

Fitzell’s trilogy (technically two short stories and a novella) shows a delirious love for language and blends sci-fi, fantasy, fabulism, and horror. The “sci-fi” opener, “Chapter & Verse,” concerns a monk who spends contemplative hours in the monastery writing and surfing the Web on his laptop (no kinky stuff, mostly word derivations and philosophy). When his own poetry takes on troubling undertones of doubt and atheism, Brother Clay wonders if the cosmopolitan computer is talking back to him. And should he listen? The puzzling, surreal “Icy” has a title that puns on the French “ici” (“here”) and is the name of a fictional Paris fashion boutique. Model Clotho remains a cipher, which may be the point, as others dress, undress, flatter, insult, and seduce her. Ultimately, she parades nude, although Fizell’s point here is not titillation but densely woven wordplay embroidered with rag-trade argot (“Just when she felt Bill tucked inside her pocket, he stole a non-returnable kiss, zipping up her expectations and then trashing her like a hand-me-down”). The longest, most accessible piece, the macabre “Tee Hee Hee,” offers Helen Tooms, a cadaverous, cancerous, grinning New England schoolmarm. Unhealed from a childhood of slights—the biggest was abandonment by her father, a drunken poet—spinsterish Helen finally visited the runaway patriarch in Ireland, but the experience did no good for the tortured daughter. With literary cues from Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha” (Fitzell annotates it in footnotes), it’s a “horror” story mainly in the Flannery O’Connor sense of the spiritually grotesque. It’s definitely the strongest in a trio that may not click for genre fans who expect their shock, awe, and wonder packaged with more standard commercial tropes.

A varied trilogy of beautifully described prose pieces, some more esoteric than others.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: 978-1-4951-5774-5

Page Count: 298

Publisher: Connect-Disconnect Publishing

Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2015

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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JURASSIC PARK

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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