An imaginative ensemble comedy for readers with twisted senses of humor.
Poltergeists and country music converge in Hager’s surreal debut novel.
Willard is 12 years old, overweight, and doesn’t do very much with his life. His parents are obsessed with NASCAR and pay little attention to him. One day, he begins to type at his laptop and suddenly finds that he’s channeling the spirit of a recently murdered country singer named Jared Whaley. Soon, other people in Willard’s tiny town of Wilson, Tennessee, are wondering whether the boy is really communing with the dead or if the whole thing is just a hoax. Harvey Boyd, an uncharismatic radio host for WTOR, “Wilson Tennessee’s Only Radio,” decides to investigate the case, and his coverage quickly wins global attention. The town is turned upside down as locals try to make sense of the supernatural event—and also try to figure out who shot Jared Whaley through the head. Although much of Hager’s novel comes off as an extended redneck joke, it’s surprisingly funny, and his prose is filled with wit, double-entendres, and social commentary. He lovingly creates his Tennessee town from the bar to the barbershop, and his plot gleefully pokes fun at deadbeat parents, lowbrow pastimes, and sexism and homophobia in small-town America. As Hager notes in his epilogue, many of the events in Whaley’s life are culled from the author’s own, giving this absurd tale an autobiographical twist. Along the way, Hager valuably describes the music industry and its abusive relationship with artists, as well as the bleak origins of many country singers. Although the novel’s final courtroom scene drags on too long, its finale is a genuine shocker, and readers will find its twist deeply satisfying. In the end, Hager pulls off a rare feat: his flawed characters are often selfish and abrasive, yet it’s fun to read about every one of them.
An imaginative ensemble comedy for readers with twisted senses of humor.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4922-7029-4
Page Count: 254
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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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