An intriguing, if overloaded, version of the Odyssey.
Honduran refugee Penelope shares the story of her life and her husband, Ulysses, a Native American who becomes a warrior in Vietnam, in this debut work of contemporary fiction.
In a Native American lodge in Eastern Oregon, Penelope, an “elder” in the Sundown family, wishes to relate the “ancient story” of the Odyssey but is urged to tell the tale of “our people and your life” instead. And so begins her first-person recounting of her birth in Honduras in 1954, her experience as a child sex slave for the M-13 gang, and her eventual escape to the Pacific Northwest. In this new world, she meets Ulysses Looking Glass “Ulee” Sundown, a pastor’s son and talented athlete, albeit with a growing record of violence. Both are 15 when Ulee kills a visiting M-13 thug and then signs up to serve in Vietnam to avoid second-degree murder charges. He becomes a skilled killer soldier yet also helps out at a local orphanage. Penelope proposes to Ulysses on leave, but he soon annuls the marriage, believing he’ll die in combat in Vietnam. Penelope gives birth to their son, Telemachus, and studies to become a doctor. The lovers finally reunite and remarry in the 1970s, after Ulee has fought in Israel and escaped a POW camp, among other exploits. They move for a time to Los Angeles for Penelope’s medical career, with Ulee by turns a professional football player, Olympics track medal winner, and impassioned minister. Penelope eventually returns to Honduras to build medical facilities, where she faces figures from her past. White (Astoundingly Joyful, Amazingly Simple, 2012, etc.), the senior pastor of Washington Cathedral in Redmond, weaves a rich tapestry of minority and marginalized experiences into his sophomore fiction effort. His updating of Homer is by turns amusing (a modern-day Telemachus) and astute (“Vietnam was an addiction, just as the Trojan War was for his namesake”). Yet the narrative struggles under the weight of its competing protagonists and multiple plot strands, with Penelope’s horrible childhood as well as adult showdown in the Honduras, for example, rather hurriedly conveyed as well as eclipsed by Ulee’s many intense and dramatic adventures.
An intriguing, if overloaded, version of the Odyssey.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63393-296-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2016
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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