Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park

disconcerting toddler-gazes & muffled curses

“And so things might have remained, had not a technician named Alice Levin walked into the Tropical Diseases Laboratory, seen Tina Bowman’s picture, and said, ‘Oh, whose kid drew the dinosaur?’”

You’re alone at a table with an eighteen-month-old. She’s staring at you. The quiet strangeness of the moment, the sense of contact without the possibility of communication, feels something like meeting the eyes of an orangutan at the zoo. I know you’re in there.

But a toddler’s appetite for contemplation is limited. So what are you going to do? Oh! You arrange your hands so that it looks like you’re showing her your left thumb, whole and complete (though draped, suspiciously, with your right forefinger). And then — with a disconcertingly placid expression — you seem to detach the upper half of your thumb! And then you reattach it. And then detach it again! And then reattach it.

And now she’s riveted. Because everything she’s spent the past eighteen months learning about bodily integrity and the movement of objects tells her that such a feat should be impossible — and yet here it is! Is this strange man some sort of mage? Do thumbs operate by a heretofore unexplored physics? Her mind flips madly through its global user’s manual. She wants you to do it again, again, again!

The child’s parents walk back in. You’ve successfully navigated these ninety perilous seconds.

The writer — alone with the staring, skeptical eyes of the reader — often resorts to similar tricks. The survivors of the plane crash in Lost are staggering through the jungle when they come upon… a polar bear?! The man in The Third Man is tooling around Vienna investigating the death of his friend Harry Lime when he happens to see… Harry Lime?! Philip Roth in Operation Shylock is having a mental breakdown in Connecticut when he makes a phone call to Israel that’s answered by… Philip Roth?! Among the most potent (and dangerous) stimulants in the storyteller’s bag of tricks is the one labeled: but that’s not possible.

The danger, of course, is that having created this irresistible moment of impossibility, you then have to explain it. And these explanations are nearly always — because the writer was treating himself to a snort of narrative cocaine, he wasn’t operating on a well-considered five-year plan — terrible. Yes, yes, the Dharma Corporation, an international conspiracy, a dizzying study of identity, whatever, the reader is bored and embarrassed and wants a refund.

But rarely (very rarely) the writer explains the apparent impossibility so ingeniously that you not only don’t want your money back — you want to fling money at him and his heirs for eternity, you want to name a Canadian basketball team after him. I speak, of course, of Michael Crichton and Jurassic Park.

Let’s get out of the way the fact that Michael Crichton is, at the level of sentences — a level that you’d think would be important to the author of a newsletter about sentences — a bad writer.

Midday sun streamed into the San Francisco law office of Cowan, Swain and Ross, giving the room a cheerfulness that Donald Genarro did not feel.

…

“This way, everybody, this way,” Ed Regis said.

Reading Crichton is, as a literary experience, like hurrying across a strange and cheap hotel room in the dark, bashing your toes into suitcases and inexplicably sharp bed-frames. But you tape your toes, you muffle your curses — because the next morning you’ll be climbing into a helicopter bound for Isla Nublar.

But before we get to Isla Nublar, re-inhabit, if you can, the psyche of someone who doesn’t yet know Jurassic Park™ — someone hasn’t watched the T-Rex force its snout down through the sunroof of the Jeep; who has never set foot on the Jurassic Park River Adventure at Universal Studios; who doesn’t automatically associate every metal ladle with the velociraptors sniffing wickedly around the kitchen. Imagine that it’s 1991 and you’re cuddled up with a new mass market paperback with a particularly well-designed cover.

And so far all that’s happened in the book is that a little girl on vacation with her family in Costa Rica has been attacked by a lizard on the beach. The girl, Tina Bowman (generically named, conveniently endowed with a freakish gift for observation), makes a sketch of the lizard for the officials at the hospital.

But that couldn’t be right! Lizards don’t stand on their hind legs, and they have five claws on their back feet, not three. Oh well, kids, you know!

But there are other attacks. A baby in her crib. A hideously mauled construction worker. So a biologist named Marty Guitierrez — hoping he might get a new species of lizard named after him — goes out searching and happens upon a howler monkey with a hunk of lizard in its mouth. He darts the monkey, bags the lizard-sample, and sends it off (along with Tina Bowman’s adorable drawing) to a lab in New York.

And here we come to the moment.

Because the scientists in New York, after analyzing the sample for “trace quantities” of this or that enzyme, shove it in the freezer and more or less forget about it. Which means that Crichton, for the first time in the book, is ready to use the d-word.

And so things might have remained, had not a technician named Alice Levin walked into the Tropical Diseases Laboratory, seen Tina Bowman’s picture, and said, “Oh, whose kid drew the dinosaur?”

One stray comment from a technician will not settle the matter, of course. There will be arguments and tests and not-as-mind-numbing-as-you-remember discourses on chaos theory and paleontology. But for the reader, the thumb-tip has now floated away from the hand. The impossible fact — that a long-extinct dinosaur bit a twentieth-century girl — has now drifted fully into view.

And you can tell, from his sudden veer into the diction of H.G. Wells (And so things might have remained…), that Crichton’s excited about this moment. And he should be. Because he knows (God, this is such a rare and wonderful feeling for a writer) that he has the goods. The mosquitoes in amber, the frog DNA, the malfunctioning fences, all of it. He has brought us to this moment of but that’s not possible and now, over the next fifty or so pages, he will steer us up to the altitude at which we’ll be able to see that it’s not just possible, it’s inevitable.

This isn’t a man doing dumb hand-tricks at the dinner table. This is a doctor in the delivery room reaching out to receive the infant’s head, watching as the newborn (for whom birth, expulsion, the end of its whole watery warm deal, was the impossibility) opens its eyes.