Earnest and engaging: a nicely turned-out if unsurprising debut that’s not likely to stay in a reader’s mind for long.
A twentysomething man comes of age somewhat belatedly, in part by discovering an old man’s secret past.
Nathan Carter is a true Boston Brahmin, but there wasn’t much silver left on the baby’s spoon by the time he was born, and his childhood was far from privileged. Now a thirtysomething slacker, Nathan spent most of his 20s hanging out in Boston, where he waited tables and moved passionlessly from one short-term girlfriend to another. When his father died and left him a small inheritance, Nathan took the money and left town, heading up to northern Vermont and settling in the small town of Eden. There, he took a job as a mailman and started going out with Kate, the daughter of the local tavernkeeper. It was beginning to look like a rural rerun of Boston—until Nathan met Wallace Fiske, the town recluse. An old Vermonter, Wallace grew up in Eden and worked his family’s farm on the outskirts of town. Ornery and brusque (even by New England standards), Wallace is not easy to make friends with, but he eventually opens up to Nathan and slowly, piece by piece, reveals to him the story of his life. The focus of it is Nora, Wallace’s late wife, whom Wallace fell in love with on first sight in the late 1940s. Wallace is short on details but he describes the miscarriage that broke Nora’s heart and took her will to live. What Nathan finds out on his own, however, is that Nora is, in fact, alive and well in upstate New York, long estranged from Wallace. What went wrong? Nathan and Kate are impulsive types, so they visit Nora to find out. It’s a predictably sad story, involving death, adultery, betrayal, and despair. Typical backwoods Vermont, in other words.
Earnest and engaging: a nicely turned-out if unsurprising debut that’s not likely to stay in a reader’s mind for long.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-4427-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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