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SUPERIOR WOMEN

Through the decades with five members of the Radcliffe Class of '46—in a wan, pulse-less novel that has the limitations of the tinny Rona Jaffe genre but little of the compensating brio or drama. Adams' central figure, at least in the first half, is Megan Greene from California: plump, pretty, sensuous, bright, from a modest background (Mom is a car-hop)—and naive enough to get her 1943 heart broken, after lots of heavy petting, by an upper-class type who marries somebody else. ("Well, if that's being in love, I won't do that again. I'll settle for sex.") So Megan has affairs with a Jewish teacher and—on her visit to N.Y.C.—a black tromboneplayer. . . while her four favorite classmates have different sorts of love/sex problems. Bigoted, pretty Southern belle Lavinia, ever-cool about men, loses one beau in WW II, then quickly settles for a dull, appropriate Manhattan marriage. Fat, maternal Peg gets pregnant by a rich, boorish young Texan—and winds up with a swarm of kids and a nervous breakdown. Cathy, Catholic but otherwise barely characterized, gets jilted by a fiance, goes to California grad-school, winds up in an affair with a priest. Nice, feisty Janet, Jewish and pre-med, junks her career for bohemian marriage to sexy playwright Adam Marr, a sort of Irish Norman Mailer. And the women's lives will overlap here and there over the next 30 years, with one decade slurring into the next and virtually all major life-events occurring offstage: Peg turns to civil rights and lesbianism; Lavinia, sexually bored and panicked by age, has affairs—including one with a long-ago, crippled beau (now a rich, political biggie); Janet, losing Adam to a series of exotic women, returns to medicine; Cathy dies of cancer; and literary agent Megan has a long, rocky affair with charismatic left-winger Henry (Lavinia's sometime bedmate too)—but winds up, in a 1983 epilogue, with two lovers (Henry and the black trombonist), plus a new career down South. . . helping Peg to run a shelter for the homeless-and-unemployed. "Are some men put off by extremes of intelligence or even attractiveness in women—put off by superior women?" That's the theme of this unshapely saga—an iffy one, especially since the "superior" women here are so fuzzily drawn, so unconvincingly motivated, so oddly (in most cases) unappealing. Off-putting, too, is the marshmallow-y sentimentality beneath Adams' polished prose. Still, if this has little of the wit and shrewd social-history that lifted Mary McCarthy's The Group above gossip-sex-and-soap, it's probably Adams' most commercial fiction yet—with enough chic misery and quasi-feminist gloss to attract an audience with uncertain taste and certain pretensions.

Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1984

ISBN: 0671020684

Page Count: 390

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: March 15, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1984

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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JURASSIC PARK

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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