It’s clear that Penn is having good fun with this soufflé of a story. As for the reader, maybe not so much.
Actor/director Penn continues his foray into fiction with this shaggy dog yarn of a secret agent–turned–freelance dispenser of justice.
Bob Honey is a man with a plan. When last we saw him, in Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff (2018), the enigmatic killer was being hauled off to the pen; now, having “opted for fugitive flight,” he’s the subject of a manhunt. He goes blackface, a disguise that a grimace-inducing fellow agent in like garb sees right through, first muttering, “When a black man use soap, his skin dry ashen,” then dropping the patois to say, “You just look like a crazy white guy with tar all over his face.“ Honey tries again, this time going in drag on the Acela train to Washington and speaking in falsetto to a senator who once did right by the downtrodden but then became a supporter of the “flim-flamming finger fucker” who won the 2016 election, for which, Bob thinks, he deserves death by mallet, Bob’s favorite instrument. Penn risks crossing over the boundaries of political incorrectness at many points, from those incidents to the very title of the book (which comes from a song of slave resistance that celebrates “cranium cracked and plashed on a pulverizing plantation stone” ). He’ll likely be tarred as an incorrigible member of the Hollywood elite as his tale winds to its close with the explosive destruction of the White House in a scene that might have been an outtake from Fight Club, spectacular but strange, perfectly in keeping with the feel of the rest of the book. It’s all very much of a piece with its predecessor, complete with sometimes-unnecessary footnotes and bursts of alliterative language (“Trees that seem to masturbate an ejaculation of wounds wishing and longing for Lennon’s laments”) that seem to be there for their own sake rather than to move the story along.
It’s clear that Penn is having good fun with this soufflé of a story. As for the reader, maybe not so much.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64428-058-4
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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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