Eruption a White-Knuckle Thrill

 

 

Eruption (2024)

By Michael Crichton and James Patterson

Little, Brown, and Company, 432 pages

★★★★ ½ 

 

Sometimes you have to forget about “literature” and evaluate a book for how well it does what the author intended. If you like heart-pounding thrillers that you rip through like a pair of ripped jeans, few have ever matched the late Michael Crichton (The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park). He died in 2008, but his widow found notes and a plot treatment for another novel (working title The Black Zone). She contacted mystery/thriller author James Patterson who went through Crichton’s files; the result is Eruption.

 

That’s Eruption as in volcanoes. It takes place in 2025–yes, next year­–on the Big Island of Hawaii. It is home to Mauna Loa, the world’s largest active volcano, whose last major event was in 1984. It and Mauna Kei, which hasn’t blown its stack in 4,000 years are the centerpieces of Eruption and, yes, there will be considerable collateral damage.

 

Before the lava flows, the authors take us back in time a bit. In 1975 a secret government plan known as Project Vulcan looked into the possibility of diverting volcano flows that imperil civilians via strategic bombing. We jump ahead to 2016 when Rachel Sherrill is leading school tours at the Hilo Botanical Garden when a student notices blackened trees gone to ash. The park is immediately closed, but several days later she is dismissed and the park looks as if nothing happened.

 

Cut to April 2025. Thirty-six-year-old geologist Dr. James MacGregor (“Mac”) of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO) is interrupted from his part-time gig of coaching surfing. He is flown to Honolulu by the U.S. Army to try to make sense of a partially illegible note and drawing scribbled by a retired general in a semi-vegetative state. In a debriefing, Col. James Briggs tells Mac of an ice tube in which radioactive herbicide cannisters were encased in glass and stored in 1978. Another Agent Orange-like weapon? Far more ominous.

 

Remember how quickly COVID spread from when you first heard of it to when people all over the globe were dying of it? This stuff is worse–so bad that if it gets out it would destroy all life on the planet in a matter of days. The bad news keeps on coming. Mac knows that a major eruption is imminent, but Briggs and his commander Gen. Mark Rivers deliver the news that if it compromises the ice tube, it’s goodbye yellow-brick road!  Mac and his HVO team are charged with making sure that doesn’t happen. In other words, this is a beat-the-clock thriller, but with various twists. It’s not exactly as if a general can bark out an order and volcanoes will say, “Yes, Sir!” Plus, Mac knows that Project Vulcan was abandoned because it flopped.

 

Like all good thrillers, personal issues and external obstacles get in the way. The stoic Mac is about to be divorced, his team member Jenny Kimura is attracted to him, and he has a team filled with smart young people–but they are young people. Jake Rogers, a dare devil pilot, is furious that flights have been grounded and ignores the flyover ban, no one is supposed to alarm the public but the New York Times sends reporters to investigate  rumors, and Oliver and Leah Cutler, two volcano-chasing TV celebrities in the vein of Crocodile Dundee demand access to the site. They are backed by tech billionaire J. P. Brett–think Elon Musk–who throws his weight around under the guise of “saving” the island.

 

Can Mac, General Rivers, and Houston demolitions expert Rebecca Cruz prevent Armageddon? Well… you’re reading this aren’t you? It is, however, to the credit of Crichton and Patterson that you will nonetheless grip the novel with white knuckles as you flip the pages. Eruption also manages to sneak in important themes–native peoples versus haloes (non-Hawaiians), folk beliefs and science, secrecy vis-à-vis the public’s right to know, and perhaps a backdoor slam at the madness of the Cold War.

 

Eruption ends rather abruptly, either because Crichton didn’t tip his hand at his ending or because Patterson wrote himself into a corner. It’s also too praiseworthy of the Army who, after all, were the reason for the problem. Yet those of a certain age might relive emotions from the Cuban Missile Crisis. Besides, it’s hard for me to slam a book whose 432 pages I read in two sittings!

 

Rob Weir

Be Mine is Sad, Poignant, and Funny

 

 

Be Mine (2023)

By Richard Ford

Ecco/HarperCollins, 342 pages.

★★★★★

 

Many literary critics (and New Yorker readers) cite John Updike’s Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom tetralogy as recent history’s finest. I admired the “Rabbit” books, but I might give the nod to the four Frank Bascombe novels penned by Richard Ford.  

 

His first three Frank Bascombe novels–The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land–revolved around the fictional town of Haddam, New Jersey. Some–especially women–find Ford (and Updike) too phallocentric. Be Mine, Ford’s fourth take on Bascombe, contains locker-room talk and male fantasies, but with a very different focus. Frank is in his 70s and knows that his clock is ticking and that his past hypermasculine ways have betrayed him. He’s twice divorced, disinterested in the real estate game, and is caring for his 47-year-old son Paul, who has been stricken with rapidly advancing ALS (“Lou Gehring’s Disease”).

 

Many of you are probably thinking, “Great! A cheery book about a grumpy old chauvinist and his son who is dying just about the worst way a human being can do so. No thank you!” That would be your loss. Be Mine is poignant and deals with big themes such as guilt, parent-child conflict, when to pivot, how to cope, and (perhaps) a last hurrah. Yet, it is also both a wise and funny book. Frank has been a heel at times, but he doesn’t hesitate to turn down an offer from former partner Mike Mahoney in order to be Paul’s nurse. “Mike” is a sketch in his own right, a Tibetan-born property mogul pumped full of Jersey wise-guy attitude.

 

Frank is done with all that and pulls some strings via an old flame, Dr. Catherine Flaherty, to get Paul seen by the Mayo Clinic. He goes all in and moves to Rochester, Minnesota, home of the Mayo. Frank is impressed, but retains his sarcastic edge:  

 

One floor below us is the “subway,” a great, tubular shopping arcade where loved ones of the sick, dying and recovering can purchase pizzas, chili dogs and hoagies, while browsing for Mayo-themed tchotchkes and mediocre Norwegian art to take back to Hibbing. It would be completely plausible to reside inside Mayo, like Quasimodo in Notre-Dame, and never have to die…. [A]s much as it’s committed to the healing mysteries, Mayo is equally committed to people-moving by the multitudes, which produces an ether of kinetic, germ-free positivism ….

 

Paul is a chip off the paternal block, sarcastic, bitter, and drawn to the surreal,  macabre, or kitschy. He calls his father “Lawrence,” wordplay on Florence Nightingale, and is by turns enthusiastic and verbose, insulting or silent. He wears a Kansas City Chiefs get-up, listens to the over-the top Anthony Newley, grills his father about Ann, his mother and Frank’s first wife.

 

ALS is fatal, so what can Frank do for Paul? Well, of course one would buy a gas-hog , poorly heated Dodge camper van, and depart on a winter trip to see Mt. Rushmore! That’s after Frank spends the hours Paul is at Mayo contemplating Heidegger or visiting a massage parlor where he drops $200 per visit for the company of 34-year-old Betty Duong Tran.

 

That’s unsettling, but a subtheme of Be Mine is that a lot of Americans are seriously tacky. Paul loves the absurdity of the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota. Neither is  enamored by the Fawning Buffalo, a run-down Indian casino:

 

The glowing but uncrowded lobby opens out directly to a cavernous, murky, low-lit gaming pavilion, a sea of slots where only a handful of players… are goosing the machines, sipping free margaritas and smoking... Poker, roulette, bingo, and dice pits are far in the rear….  A gray haze drifts … into the lobby, around the sides of which is the “Naughty Spot Gift Boutique” with a red neon sign, and a few other un-patronized storefronts–a Condom and Tattoo shop, an exotic bakery, a Crafts Centre with a window of baskets and knock-off tribal trappings for sale.... [N]othing here is living up to the billboard hype. Possibly it never did. Tom Jones is singing strenuously over everything. “Woah… whoa… whoa… whoa… whoa… whoa.

 

All the while Frank battles his Log Cabin Republican daughter who insists Paul should be with her in Scottsdale. (Both find Clarissa obnoxious.) As you might expect, Mt. Rushmore doesn’t live up to its hype either. Or does it? Snark and tragedy aside, Be Mine is about letting go and what the living can learn from the dying. Does Frank find redemption? Far be it for me to tell. This is a smart book from which you can glean many conclusions.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gridiron Madness at UMass

 

 

I recently struck up a conversation with three visitors from 1200 miles away. They came to watch their alma mater, Missouri, tackle UMass in football. One worried it could be a “tough road game” for Mizzou: “an unfamiliar team in an unfamiliar stadium.” I laughingly replied, “If they win by less than 50 points they should fire the coach.”

 

Maybe Ryan Bamford, the captain of the RMS Titanic–sorry, UMass Athletic Director–thinks it a moral victory that losing by 45-3 beat my 50-point spread, though an unsubstantiated rumor holds that Missouri dressed the cheerleading squad for the fourth quarter. Are there any adults in the UMass administration with the courage to pull the plug on the brain-dead experiment? A chemistry professor with a success/failure rate of 24-112 would be denied tenure. In the 14 years since UMass moved “up” (?) from Division II it has burned through 5 coaches and has paid out enough termination money to blow up the Tower Library and build a rational facility.

 

I love UMass. It’s where I got my doctorate, made good friends, and taught. I even had UMass in my will. I’m feeling just fine right now, but if UMass can waste money and young lives on gridiron folly, there are hundreds of more worthy causes. CTE brain injury research for instance.

 

Who’s to blame for a program that allows young bodies to be savaged by bigger, faster, stronger, and more skilled opponents? Bamford gets some of the blame, with assists from coddling chancellors, male legislators who took too many blows to the head, and far-flung alums who haven’t been to Amherst since their graduation kegger. But I assign most of the blame to the Patriots who carelessly won a few Super Bowls. Prior to the Tom Brady era, New England football was an afterthought. On a warm cloudy fall day a few thousand might show up for games at UMass, Harvard, or Boston College. Elsewhere it was in the hundreds. (When it was warm and sunny, rational people went leaf-peeping.)

 

Against Missouri, UMass failed to fill McGuirk Stadium’s 17,000 seats. That bespeaks the difference between non-football and football cultures. If fewer than 17,000 showed up for a Michigan game, the AD and coach would be hanged, the president stripped naked and forced to run a gauntlet through Ann Arbor, the faculty reorganized, and the entire student body expelled. UMass is so far out of its league it couldn’t find it in a hall or mirrors. Yet next year, in still another misguided effort, UMass will join the Mid-American Conference (MAC). In the name of “fixing” the football program numerous well-established men’s and women’s teams will be forced to join the MAC, not the least of which are its nationally known basketball programs. Imagine the hordes (not!) parading into McGuirk or the Mullins Center to see UMass play natural rivals like Akron and Ball State. Watch as they take on Miami and Michigan; that is, Miami of Ohio and Eastern and Western Michigan. For what it’s worth, MAC member Northern Illinois beat Notre Dame this year, but if you dream that UMass will ever do so, kindly see one of the many fine therapists in the Pioneer Valley.  

 

Want to sell out McGuirk?  Dump football and do as the Romans did. Begin with a few bloody Ultimate Fight Club bouts, let the band march at halftime, and then bring on the main event: Christians versus gladiators, lions, and tigers. The crowd will go wild!