Air is said to be leaking from the dot.com balloon, but, important as that may be, a novel about stocks can’t rely on stock...
Subtitled “a dot.comedy,” Scoville’s formula-beset debut concerns romantic, social, and office politics in the boom economy of California’s Silicon Valley.
Paul is adrift. In college he dreamed of writing “the Great American novel,” but his only marketable skill is an innate flair for computers. Liz is unemployable. At Stanford, she majored in English, and she still views the world of technology as “a blizzard of acronyms in a vacuum of time-delayed adolescence.” With their worthless degrees, the two find themselves at a start-up company called TeraMemory working for Barry, a young, graceless dot.com millionaire with tortured syntax, Paul as a computer consultant, Liz as a personal grammarian. Despite their personal and ethical misgivings, romance ensues as stock options accrue. Meanwhile, Steve, an expert hacker with limited social skills and anti-capitalist aggression, plots TeraMemory’s undoing under the metaphysical auspices of Psychrist, a Bay Area techno/performance-art wizard. For the techno-challenged (“Terans”), the prose here can be challenging, as in some of the e-mails that consist primarily of computer code, but it can also amuse, especially when it charts Steve’s plans for hacker actions. Still again, it’s also way too often hackneyed—here, daylight “flees” and “geek” appears as a verb. No irony goes unexplained, characters often mutter to themselves (“Marriage, he scoffed to himself”), and chapters are cutely titled (“Hacked in Seattle”; “Bidding for a Date with the CFO on the e-Bay of Love”). The idea—that all this wealth requires some foundation in something—isn’t original, and here it drives characters straight from movie-of-the-week casting.
Air is said to be leaking from the dot.com balloon, but, important as that may be, a novel about stocks can’t rely on stock characters. Even dot.comedies need real humor, not overdoses of cuteness.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-7434-1120-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
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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