A meandering, comically flat sendup of higher education.
Cobb’s farcical novel explores the sexually dysfunctional dynamics of a college campus.
Lily Putnam just began writing her dissertation on Toni Morrison and lands a job as an instructor in an English department at Lakewood College, a small liberal arts college hidden in the outskirts of the Florida Panhandle. She’s a striking beauty and enjoys flaunting it. Lily quickly finds herself well-hunted erotic quarry—she begins a casual sexual relationship with Brasfield Finch, the department’s writer-in-residence, and something even more fleeting with the aggressive but impotent department chair, Rufus Doublet. She even sleeps with a 19-year-old sophomore jock, David Godby, who is as strikingly handsome as he is numbingly stupid. Meanwhile, Finch is incensed to learn that the college is spending a small fortune to bring Lenora Hart—a famous novelist—to campus to speak. He had a brief fling with her 15 years ago and detests the book that won her near universal adulation as well as wealth. He tries to block her visitation, but President Steagall is able to blackmail him into quiescence—Finch has a reputation on campus as an alcoholic who routinely shirks his professional duties. The plot swings uneasily between erotic frivolity and savage sexual assault—the campus is beleaguered by student streakers and then is embroiled in potential legal action when a freshman is gang-raped by the members of a popular men’s social club. Cobb (Sweet Home: Stories of Alabama, 2013, etc.) was a writer-in-residence at Alabama’s University of Montevallo for over a decade and displays a keen grasp of the comic absurdity of campus politics. He also imaginatively conjures an eccentric cast, including a racist dean who falls in love with Lily almost upon first sight, and a local priest, Hamner Curbs, who is a closeted and shockingly reckless sexual predator. The plot, however, is plodding and aimless, a narratively peripatetic amble from one vaudevillian moment to the next. The story is built around Lily, who seems shallowly defined by her erotic power. The reader learns virtually nothing about her, her background, or why she chose literature as a profession. She rarely speaks about books or art or shows any abiding interest in either. In fact, no one in the English department seems all that keen to discuss literature, though there’s never a deficit of interest in prurient gossip. Also, the attempts at humor are more ribald than funny, and the descriptions of numerous sexual encounters in the work manage to be both peculiar and banal. For example, Finch lands himself in hot water after an indiscreet remark during a writing workshop, requesting a female student revise a story she wrote starring her cat. He jokes: “Re-write your story, Miss Carlton, and give us some conflict and resolution. Don’t just tell us, but show us. Then we, the readers, will love your pussy, too, so much we’ll want to kiss it.”
A meandering, comically flat sendup of higher education.Pub Date: May 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-60489-203-1
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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