Hilarious and touching, icily removed, yet bracingly real.
Being held up at gunpoint either sends a college student into the throes of despair or gives her a new reason to live: maybe a healthy dash of both.
It’s a good thing Vida (Girls on the Verge, 1999) makes her fiction debut with this novel instead of a story collection: she takes getting used to, but it’s worthwhile. Ellis is a 21-year-old Columbia University student walking in Riverside Park when a man tells her that he’s going to kill her, then himself. Trying to convince him of everything worth living for, Ellis spouts poetry, throwing everything at him from “Leda and the Swan” to William Carlos Williams and Philip Larkin, melting his despair until he lets her go. Later, when the police come to her apartment and her roommate answers the door, Ellis thinks: “I wonder if this is how it will be from now on: whenever there are policemen at the door we’ll assume they’re for me.” The remainder of the tale is a short string of nonevents (even the trip Ellis takes to the Philippines hardly registers), the dull detritus of a benumbed student’s life. It’s a frustrating, brilliant story about an irritating person with genuine trauma acting hatefully to all those around her. There’s too much smartass to the book: in a scene when an old high school friend is telling Ellis about a teacher who taught Sylvia Plath, Vida can’t resist throwing in that the teacher “put her head in the oven.” But then two pages later, when Ellis is obnoxiously lying and claiming to have been raped, she thinks: “I feel oddly liberated and I realize why: if I had been raped, I’d feel more justified doing everything I’m doing.” It’s a genius line, ringing true—but sure to be undermined by another poor joke later on (we won’t get into the scene where Ellis goes to the barber and gets a mullet—too much Gen-X irony in that one).
Hilarious and touching, icily removed, yet bracingly real.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-4027-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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