A sporadically insightful, intermittently entertaining blend of memoir, literary history, and fabulist speculation.
A man and his wife, Americans, go to England to visit sites associated with the writer Thomas Hardy; while there, the man sees Hardy in an apparition: “Something I missed,” the phantom whispers.
The man, like the author of this novel, is named Floyd. Like the author, too, the character Floyd has a wife, a grown daughter, and a cognitive deficiency—the result of a virus that targeted his brain a few decades earlier. In his new book, Skloot (Revertigo: An Off-Kilter Memoir, 2014, etc.) has tossed together a salad of fictionalized memoir, Hardy biography, and travelogue. Floyd takes off after the Hardy phantom. It turns out this isn’t Floyd’s first “Visitation” (his term); in the past, he’s been “Visited” by Freud, Bach, and Nabokov, among others. Somehow, though, this Visit is different, so Floyd sets up an impromptu investigation. What, exactly, is that “something” that Hardy missed? Something to do with his love life, surely. As Floyd and his wife, Beverly, visit Hardy’s home, birthplace, and other landmarks, they reflect on his tumultuous relationships, gossiping with local Hardy aficionados as they go. Gradually, the reason for Floyd’s ongoing Hardy obsession becomes clear: it turns out that he’s grieving the recent death of his mentor, a college professor who first turned him on to Hardy’s work and, at the same time, inspired Floyd to find his own voice as a writer. But there’s another facet to this search. As Skloot writes, “the chance to make sense of Hardy’s strangeness and struggle gave me a chance to make sense of my own. I was engaged in an ongoing process of learning to live as a brain-damaged man and resist neurological disintegration.” The unfortunate end result is at times sentimental, at other times tedious. The narrative is dragged down by the inclusion of not-entirely-crucial and ultimately uninteresting details: the photos Floyd and Beverly snap, the naps they take in the afternoons, and so on. The passages on Hardy’s life and work veer into blatant speculation, a shaky foundation that doesn’t support the conclusions Skloot draws.
A sporadically insightful, intermittently entertaining blend of memoir, literary history, and fabulist speculation.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-299-31040-0
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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