With wit, panache, and genuine affection for her characters, Goodman (Total Immersion, 1989) offers a saga of an archetypal Jewish-American family. Though ostensibly a novel, many of the ``chapters'' here were originally published in The New Yorker as short stories, giving the work the feel of a collection, a photo album offering both casual snapshots and formal portraits of the family's history. A lack of narrative cohesion is sometimes discernible, then, as each chapter takes up a different relative during the last 15 years or so of the family life. Still, the slight discrepancies and holes in the chronicle are only mildly disruptive, for Goodman creates a wonderful collection of genuine individuals. The book begins with 73-year-old Rose Markowitz at the deathbed of her beloved second husband Maury. Popping Percodans, suffering through a visit from Maury's estranged and overbearing Israeli daughter, Rose is doing all she can to retain dignity in the midst of difficulties, including her sons' bickering financial advice. The aging Rose makes several appearances later in the narrative, though the tangled lives of her two children, Henry and Ed, take center stage. The Anglophilic Henry, a second-rate art dealer in Venice Beach, transforms himself, becoming the manager of a Laura Ashley boutique in Oxford (while changing sexual preferences midstream). Meanwhile, Middle East scholar Ed wages small battles with life's encroaching difficulties: Rose's overdoses and illnesses, his daughter Miriam's new fanatical orthodoxy, and the small, persistent indignities and peculiarities of the scholarly life. These trials and tribulations are hardly as prosaic as they sound, for humor and compassion abound; Goodman draws the reader into the family circle with such deftness and speed that these self-aware, determined characters all begin to seem remarkably and enjoyably familiar. A success for Goodman, offering a frank and funny depiction of the strains and intermittent but distinct joys of family relations.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-374-15321-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1996
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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