Parrish puts his Joshua Rabb series (Nothing But the Truth, 1995, etc.) on hold for an equally stolid two-act legal melodrama tracing the fallout from a most heinous rape. Act One begins when lace-curtain Boston transplant Mary Kate O'Dwyer takes 16-year-old working girl Donna Alvarez into her home in Scottsdale, planning to adopt her legally. Before the final papers can be filed, Donna's former pimp tracks her down in Arizona and peddles her to sex-starved lawyer Philip Wilkott and his rough-trade lover Grant Felsen, who break into Kate's house and rape both Donna and Kate's three-year-old daughter Jennifer. When preliminary tests indicate that Wilkott's infected Jennifer with the AIDS virus, Kate's boyfriend goes wild, beating Wilkott's name out of the pimp. DNA testing proves that Wilkott was the rapist, but Wilkott's well-connected father gets the case thrown out on a technicality. These early scenes, though marred by nonstop preaching and some intolerable dialogue, work hard to whip up sympathy for the decent heroes, whose thirst for justice is thwarted at every turn by the law. It's in Act Two, which begins when Kate decides to take the law into her hands by killing Wilkott, that things go wrong, and not just for Kate. Kate's plans don't pan out exactly as she'd hoped (Parrish inexplicably throws away his biggest scene here); Wilkott Sr. presses for her prosecution anyway; and suddenly everybody in the legal system who'd been ganging up on her before turns a smiling face to her. The irredeemable villains place themselves beyond the pale by their racist, anti-Semitic, anti-feminist slurs, and the potentially explosive legal debate trails off in a series of skirmishes that show justice rousingly if not very convincingly triumphing over the law. There'll even be reprieves for Donna and Jennifer, as if tenderhearted Parrish couldn't bear to take leave of Scottsdale without righting every wrong. Like-minded readers will lap it all up.
Pub Date: July 31, 1996
ISBN: 0-525-94161-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
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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