A meandering story, though funny enough in a blasé way, featuring sly asides on everything from the perfidy of men to the...
Love and a nice apartment are hard to find in Manhattan, says this second novel by the author of Going Down (1996).
The daughter of a rich fashion designer, Liv Kellerman never had to work a day in her life—until she left her lawyer husband when he started taking Prozac and stopped having sex with her. Problem is, he owns their apartment. Liv takes a job reading to a blind judge, but she can’t afford the cockroach-infested MacDougal Street walkup she’s found on a salary of eight dollars an hour. So she signs on as a real-estate trainee in a seedy office run by a mannish woman named Dale and is soon earning commissions on various weird lofts and living spaces. Wearying of Dale’s out-loud fantasizing about the young girls she lusts after, Liv moves on to a much more upscale firm, raking in bigger commissions and learning that rich clients can be really strange. (One couple asks whether she’d be interested in donating an egg or two to provide a sibling for their precious tot. She demurs.) Her affair with Andrew Lugar, an eccentric architect who likes to bite during sex, is going nowhere; ditto her divorce. After reading Andrew’s diary, annoyed by his loony, egomaniacal descriptions of their slightly warped romance and by the realization that he never intended to leave his girlfriend, Liv contemplates shooting the jerk. She settles for dumping him after he chomps off her earlobe. Nothing ever comes up roses for this contemporary urban heroine: her soon-to-be-ex is selling their old apartment, she has to show it to buyers who criticize the décor . . . and so on. All this convoluted action would be a lot more compelling, however, if Liz had even half the sexiness and spunk of Bennington Bloom, Going Down’s call-girl heroine
A meandering story, though funny enough in a blasé way, featuring sly asides on everything from the perfidy of men to the purpose of Thanksgiving turkeys.Pub Date: May 7, 2001
ISBN: 1-57322-185-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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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