NEXT

I had made a personal decision that I wouldn’t use this blog for editorial reviews of books, music, or films. Because no one cares what I have to say. Nor should they. However, if I can stop one – just one – person from reading Next by Michael Crichton , I will consider my life a success.

I had heard nothing of the book before I purchased it. Not to be elitist, but I don’t read a lot of bestsellers because they are almost always total crap. For every Kite Runner, you get a Runaway Jury. However, my flight from Dallas to New Orleans was delayed by six hours, and the only place to buy books was a snack shop which carried only the top ten paperback bestsellers. All the books looked at sounded exactly the same - they all had titles like “Hard Luck” or “Bad Medicine” or “Final Truth” and were about “the world of medicine gone wrong” or “when the law goes bad” or, in the case of some book called The Last Templar, the exact same plot as the Da Vinci Code. I’m not sure how that was even legal.

I bought Next because it had a simple, one-word title, came in multiple colors (seriously – I bought the bright green one), and the cover featured a monkey with a barcode. I’ll pretty much read anything with a monkey on the cover. Also, the back cover featured no description of the book, which I thought was ballsy. I gleaned from the reviews that it was about genetic modification and testing, and being in the medical field myself, I thought it would be educational. I plunked down my $9.95. In retrospect, I should have used that ten bucks on a really cheap hooker in New Orleans, gotten genital warts, and castrated myself. That would have been more fun than this book.

Next features, at a conservative estimate, 27 different plotlines, all introduced one after the other, until you’re about 400 pages in before they even begin to connect. And in point of fact, only some plotlines connect to each other; most don’t. Several times characters are introduced which we are led to believe will be important, but are never revisited. The biggest of these plots include:
1) The story of a guy named Burnet whose genetic materials were gathered without his permission and sold to UCLA, and as a result they somehow now legally owned his whole body. And his daughters and grandson’s bodies, because they carry the same genes.

2) The story of a guy who discovers a “maturity gene,” which makes immature people grow up. His brother accidentally snorts it and becomes a banker.

3) The story of a guy who combined his own DNA with an ape, then for some reason leaves the creation in a lab in Bethesda, only to find out that it actually worked and there is now a ten year-old half-ape/half-human kid living in a cage in his old lab. He is able to go to the National Institutes of Health and take Monkeyboy away with no difficulty at all. No one comes after him. He then passes Monkeyboy off as a real kid, even sending him to public school. His wife and family are okay with this, even encouraging.

4) The aforementioned daughter and the grandson of Burnet, who are on the run from bounty hunters from UCLA who want their genetic materials, which they somehow plan to harvest in the back of a Hummer. The descriptions and actions of the bounty hunter and his assistant are 100 percent stolen from the film Dumb & Dumber. It’s almost uncanny. I was waiting for the guy to be killed by ingesting hot peppers. Instead he has his ear bitten off by Monkeyboy.

5) The story of a woman who has genetically modified her parrot to be much smarter than average parrots. The parrot, named Gerard, carries on full conversations and is portrayed as being smarter than most of the human characters. Hundreds of pages are devoted to the adventures of the parrot; the woman’s husband gives the parrot away, the recipient of the parrot doesn’t like the parrot so he gives it to a flight attendant, who then sells it to a pet store. The pet store owner decides to give it to his mother, so sets off on a cross-country jaunt with the parrot. All told, approximately 200 pages are devoted to getting the parrot to California for the purpose of one horribly convoluted plot point which also involves Monkeyboy.

6) The story of an orangutan that can speak Dutch and French. We spend at least five chapters on this orangutan only to have him killed by a hunter and never brought up again.

There are many, many other plots in the book, most of which don’t tie together.

It would take longer to document my problems with this book than it took Crichton to write it. Here is what springs immediately to mind:

1) We don’t need to know the absolutely massive backstories of minor characters. For instance, pages upon pages are devoted to an analysis of the relationship between the woman who genetically tinkered with the parrot and her husband, all for the purpose of explaining why the husband gives the parrot away. The parrot could have flown out a window, been taken by animal control, been kidnapped by aliens, anything. But no, we get descriptions of affairs, descriptions of mistresses who aren’t part of the story, descriptions of the rooms in which the affairs take place, all for the purpose of getting the parrot to California for one laughable plot point.

Let’s look at this another way. Here is how various authors would ask for a tissue:

Elmore Leonard: “Gimme a tissue.”

Stephen King: “I think I need a tissue. My nose is

Dissolving melting leaking from my skull

running.”

Richard Russo: “Life in a small New England town had taught him one thing; sometimes you just needed a tissue.”

Christopher Hitchens: “God Sucks.”

Now, here is how Crichton would do it:

“Last Saturday it was raining slightly, with a slight chill in the air. John Peterson went outside to get the newspaper, the front page of which announced that trade talks with China were ongoing and the Redskins beat the Buffalo Bills the night before. Didn’t cover the spread, Peterson noticed, but won. Bout time, he thought. He ran into his neighbor Estelle Wankman, an older woman with attractive features. Her long, gray hair had clearly once been a luxurious shade of blonde, but not anymore. On the whole though, he thought she’d aged gracefully. They made small talk, mostly about Estelle’s youngest daughter Sarabeth, who’d won the Phillips Country spelling bee four times in high school before joining the Marines and shipping off to Guam. Peterson always liked Sarabeth and the way she’d squint while talking to him. Peterson chatted with Estelle perhaps longer than he should have, the cold air finally creaking through his bones, up his body and eventually into his head where it settled. Later that day Peterson couldn’t help but notice a thin, mucousy discharge slowly flowing from his nasal cavity. He decided it had to go, and so he went looking for a tissue. He found Pete Johnson, his college drinking buddy turned supervisor at his usual place by the water cooler, no doubt talking about the Redskins, and inquired as to whether or not Johnson might have a tissue, so that John could wipe his nose. Johnson said he did, so they adjourned back to his office.”

2) Crichton commits a cardinal sin in fiction writing – he gives two characters the same name. Not just two characters, two kids, both about the same age. At first (after I figured out that they were not the same kid) I thought he just hadn’t noticed he’d done it. Turns out he did it (why else?) for a horribly contrived plot point near the end of the book. And the name is Jamie – how many boys are named Jamie these days? He couldn’t have called them Jake, or Matt?

3) Monkeyboy. There’s so much to tell about Monkeyboy. Talks as good as a human, but he’s got monkey hair, and lots of it. We’re told that he can pass as a real boy, but he can climb as well as a monkey (he proves this several times with fences, trees, telephone poles, etc.), can run unbelievably fast (he catches up to a speeding Hummer) and, during one scene (which is supposed to be emotional and dramatic) he THROWS HIS POO AT PEOPLE. And the scientist’s family just accepts this new member of their family. This guys wife (who, to her credit, does ask if the guy made ape whoopee) just settles in and starts raising Monkeyboy, even facing him away from her and grooming him like a real monkey mother would.

4) The parrot. The parrot’s name is Gerard, and he’s very, very annoying. He believes he is smarter than all of the humans in the book and keeps saying as much. Now that I think about it though, he’s right. Gerard eventually gets from Paris to California, where the bounty hunters are pursuing Burnet’s daughter and grandson, one of the two Jamies. (While we’re on the subject, the daughter’s name is Alex. Took me three chapters to figure out she was female. Monkeyboy’s name is Dave, in case you were curious.) Gerard makes a sound like a shotgun loading, which fools the bounty hunters, and they run away. That’s it. Hundreds of pages devoted to the genetically modified parrot just so he could make a sound like a gun.

I’ve decided I don’t feel like writing about this piece of crap anymore. That’s the beauty of blogs, I suppose. I will add that at one point, about halfway through, I thought Crichton was writing a comedy, along the lines of Dave Barry’s two novels Big Trouble and Risky Business. “Madcap” is the word that kept going through my mind, which I would assume is not what you want your audience to think when they’re reading what is supposed to be a heavy, dramatic treatise on genetic testing and modification. In fact, the only thing that convinced me that Crichton wasn’t being totally tongue-in-cheek was a twenty page diatribe at the end of the book in which he bitches about ownership of genetic materials and the patenting of genes. He says this will lead to humans not being able to own their own bodies – if a company has a patent on a certain gene, he argues, and that gene is in your body, you are in possession of stolen property. Thus they can send Joe 'Mental' Mentalino after you and harvest your DNA in the back of a Hummer. Or at least try to, before they’re warded off by Monkeyboy and Parrotman.

Do us a favor man, go back to books about dinosaurs. Those were fun.