While the large cast slows its momentum, this courtroom tale should appeal to readers who enjoy legal and psychological...
When one psychologist accuses another of planting false memories in a client’s mind, everybody lawyers up and someone winds up dead.
In Kluft’s (Good Shrink/Bad Shrink, 2014, etc.) latest novel, attractive young associate Linda Gilchrist becomes part of the defense team for even more striking Dr. Joan Underwood, the target of a lawsuit by another psychologist, Dr. Gordon Travers. Underwood had treated one of Travers’ former patients, Melody Jarrett, who suffered from multiple personality disorder. One of Jarrett’s personalities said Travers had molested her during her counseling sessions with him. Travers said the “recovered memories” Underwood brought to the surface were false, and that revealing them damaged his practice and reputation. But Gilchrist’s team feels Travers doth protest too much, and that he thinks “he can ride that whole false memory thing to a big payday” against Underwood and the hospital she worked for while treating Jarrett. But is Travers in the right, and does Jarrett have some hidden agenda? She did leave his practice abruptly, and then refused to take his calls. Curiously, the governor has a private interest in the case. He also has a personal interest in well-connected Billie Mason, a beautiful woman with a backstory who’s “admired for her gravity-defying bust.” The author is a professor of clinical psychology who has served as an expert witness and a defendant in trials involving false memory. His knowledge and experience allow him as a novelist to get into the weeds of the subject, offering intriguing details and realistic courtroom scenes. But the throughline of the book can get lost among the discussions of marital woes and favorite mystery writers. In addition, an overabundance of characters bogs down the story. To help readers, a two-page glossary of major players is provided, but while it includes an entry for a dog, it fails to list key character Travers. Graphic language may put off some readers. But others will delight in seeing various players’ secrets unspool in and outside of the courtroom.
While the large cast slows its momentum, this courtroom tale should appeal to readers who enjoy legal and psychological maneuvers.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-949093-27-8
Page Count: 427
Publisher: IPBooks
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2019
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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