A coming-of-age story that features a hero as ambivalent as the book's title—and the reader's response is likely to be just about equally so-so. Twenty-six-year-old Aaron Bright, a talented, struggling writer, should be getting married at this point in his life, but he can't quite bring himself to tie the knot—even though the woman in question is talented, beautiful, and fabulously wealthy besides. Aaron loves her, too, so the source of the problem must lie elsewhere—and consequently Lazar spends several hundred pages recapitulating his hero's miserable childhood in an effort to find out what it is. Trauma number one occurred when eight-year-old Aaron watched his father—the whimsical host of a children's TV show in Denver—take a fatal parachute jump. Left to grow up fatherless in the home of his widowed mother, a harried, eccentric violinist, Aaron becomes the quintessential outsider at the elite private school his grandparents insist he attend. Stigmatized by thriftshop clothes and his own nerdy conversation, Aaron suffers years of isolation and self-loathing before he learns to play court jester to a few popular rich boys, thus snagging himself a position on the edge of the ``in'' crowd. From this vantage point, he's able to covet his new friends' girlfriends, share a little in their wealth, and even win a spot at an Ivy League college while most of his friends succumb to drugs and other vices. In college, he becomes a solitary-poet type, and soon enough reels in Clarisse, a beautiful heiress whose dream is to paint portraits of modern ``saints'' and to live with him in happy domesticity. Can Aaron accept his good fortune and marry the girl? Despite the undertow of all those unhappy childhood memories, there's little doubt that a young man with his ambition will see the dilemma through. A connect-the-dots first novel with a studied, self-conscious, sporadically vivid style.
Pub Date: Feb. 2, 1998
ISBN: 0-06-039211-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
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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