In Dickey's first novel since Deliverance (1970), Frank Cahill, who owns and runs a public swimming pool in Atlanta before WW II, goes blind from a raging case of diabetes. The insult is great, but greater still is news of the death of his son Joel (a child Cahill never knew) in an Air Corps training crash. So Cahill journeys with his dog Zack to the Air Corps base in North Carolina, where he's welcomed at first as an object of pity. But not for long: Cahill begins in his sightless way to delve, through heard voices and by way of phrasings alone, into the mystery of Joel's death. Joel, it turns out, was chief magus in a corpsmen-cult called Alnilam, a mixture of astrology, the Aprocrypha, Nietzsche, etc.—and Dickey strives mightily to fix this arcane canopy (not unreminiscent, incidentally, of one of Dickey's own more shaky longer poems, on the Zodiac) over this 683-page novel. But it doesn't come to much—and what perhaps would have held interesting immediacy as a short story turns into a force-fed ordeal of reiterated good-old-boy common sense and highfalutin metaphor. And device: for Cahill's blind-seeker thoughts are, in most scenes, set apart in bold type to one side of the page, while the sighted (and usually dullard) reality is to the other side of the page. The Cahill bold-type—sense-information mostly—runs to the molten flab of Dickey's poetry at its worst ("Which girl is still in the circle where all others are gone? Which face outlasted the death ball? She came at him as through the eye of a lock. His chest was the sound of a coring-drill; in his belly, it massed with the unbroken sullenness of organ music"), and the result overall—rather ping-ponging and eye-crossing—is one less of reward than of a long and wearying confusion.
Pub Date: June 5, 1987
ISBN: 1558170863
Page Count: 770
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1987
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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