Sexy premise, mushy plot.
Rosner’s breathy, lightweight second novel (The Speed of Light, 2001) concerns a German artist and his Israeli model.
Both Danzig, a 58-year-old painter who’s been blocked for years, and Merav, who poses for his class at the San Francisco Art Institute, have suffered traumas. Danzig, the son of Nazis, carries the weight of shame that drove him to leave Germany for years before. He made a splash as an artist in California in the early 1980s, but at present, he only teaches and won’t paint. The considerably younger Merav left Israel after Arab-Jewish violence killed her closest friend, Yossi. While posing for Danzig’s life-drawing class, she is chillingly reminded of the story of her grandmother, Esther, discovered hiding in a barn during WWII but spared by a German soldier overwhelmed by her beauty. (Parallels between the two stories are drawn throughout.) Taken by Merav’s good looks, Danzig convinces her to come to his Marin County barn so he can paint her. Instead of bedding her instantly, as he has done with other models (with disastrous consequences), he allows Merav to guide him as his muse. (“He wants her, but not in the flesh.”) Plenty of wispy flashbacks attempt to give these characters some weight: the 1953 suicide of Danzig’s older sister Margot, who was devastated after learning the truth about their parents; Danzig’s previous affairs with models Andrea and Susan; teenaged Merav’s life on a kibbutz; Merav’s switch from artist to model and her brief marriage to a photographer. The author strains to show her characters correcting the historical record.
Sexy premise, mushy plot.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-44222-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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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