A 'plot' is not fiction, as you know, but very real; it is the record of someone's brain, a trail like a snail's trail, sticky and shameful. . . ." And in these often abstract short stories, shame and guilt and the many deaths of personality sever those all-important connections between men and women as they pursue, flee from, and pursue again themselves and each other. The ideal of marriage, a metaphor of union, is the "sacred adventure" never achieved; and infidelity becomes an acknowledgment of the inevitability of doomed isolation and aridity. Love-making on the grass is blown about with Dixie cups and "small plastic spoons." And the woman is an "echo only of his shouts and cries," or those of other men. In "The Sacred Marriage," a dead writer's young wife confers his "divinity" on succeeding lovers; in another story, a fiancee of a dying man leaves the hospital to sleep with his disciple, in "Did You Ever Slip on Red Blood?" the killer of a hijacker searches for the erotic moment of his kill through becoming the lover of the girl who had absorbed the moment of death into her consciousness — "What was it like. . . . When it happened." But the attempt to remain intact is unreal, as in the chilling "The Children" in which a suburban housewife's bastion is ringed with incursions by dirt, strangers, and even the terrifying self-containment of her own children. In Miss Oates' feverish landscapes, the streets are crowded with phantoms seeking out victims, avengers, and those perfect unions which never come about. "You do not exist until you begin to run." Miss Oates in these stories approaches a mystic sin-dense vision in which the marital or adulterous bed is "crammed with people. . . all becoming each other. Becoming protoplasm," beneath the Celestial City. Commanding even if a few stories are only notebook exercises; all press forward into new ground.
Pub Date: Sept. 6, 1972
ISBN: 0449237249
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Vanguard
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1972
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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