Bring Back the T. Rex

By Lev Grossman

Next (HarperCollins; 433 pages) is Michael Crichton's 15th novel, and I can't say for sure that it's his worst, but I can say for sure that it's the worst I've read, and I've read a bunch. And that includes his last book, State of Fear, in which he attempted to frighten us with the idea that global warming is not actually happening but is instead a hoax staged by a shadowy network of overzealous environmentalists. Boo!

Of course, Crichton's ambition is never merely to scare us. The Crichtonian view of humanity is that we're all a bunch of overeager meddlers, so high on greed and curiosity that we can't resist trifling with complex systems (you know--DNA, nanotechnology, alien spheres, Japan) in the name of progress, which then turn around and bite us, often literally. This view is not necessarily incorrect, and Crichton has expressed it in some first-rate, even prescient, works of genre fiction, notably Congo and Jurassic Park. (Crichton is in real life famously tall--he's usually reported as 6 ft. 9 in.--and one wonders if that helps him see what's coming ahead of the rest of us.)

Next may or may not be prescient, but it's definitely bad. It's about--to pick a few examples from its ashtray of half-finished plots--a man who gets treated for cancer and survives, only to find that unscrupulous doctors have patented his family's cancer-resistant cell line and are trying to harvest it by force from his relatives. Also, a scientist who inadvertently crosses his genes with that of a chimp and creates a talking monkey. And some other scientist who comes up with a gene-therapy treatment that makes irresponsible people more mature. Had enough? No? There's a transgenic parrot that does math and quotes old movies. Boo!

These plots are acted out by a large and largely interchangeable cast of characters--Next feels less like a novel than some kind of interminable convention. You can recognize the good guys, who are sober and clear-eyed. You can recognize the bad guys, who are reckless and shortsighted, and if you still don't get it, they're mean to children. The villains here are all people, which is a problem, since Crichton's people are a lot less plausibly human than his dinosaurs, of which there are zero in Next. There's only one authentically chilling moment, when an orangutan peers out of the jungle in Sumatra and swears gutturally at some tourists in Dutch, but it leads nowhere. (And anyway, Crichton is just recycling--or is it cloning?--his own supergorillas from Congo.)

The many plots in Next (and doesn't that title belong to Michael Lewis?) are linked together by a collection of coincidences so haphazard and unbelievable that it's almost shocking to read them under the byline of a novelist as seasoned as Crichton. It's possible he is trying something new here, that he deliberately opted out of his usual central driving plot to present us instead with a panoramic Babel-style view of a whole society gone genetically mad, I tell you, mad. If so, the experiment, like so many he describes, has gone disastrously wrong. This kind of messiness doesn't suit him at all. Crichton's narratives work because they're as gleaming and orderly as nature is frighteningly chaotic. Not that he's wrong: for all I know we may be heading for a transgenic apocalypse. It's just that in literature, unlike in science, being right isn't enough.