[In the following excerpt, Udovitch favorably assesses The Lost World as a thriller but ridicules Crichton for his allusions to what she terms contemporary "hot-button" issues.]

The director James Cameron once observed that criticizing Jurassic Park (the movie, not the book) is like criticizing a roller coaster for not being Proust. Fans of Mr. Cameron's deft touch in such works as Aliens and both Terminator movies will recognize the grace with which he sidesteps the issue of a direct comparison between Jurassic Park (in this instance and hereafter, primarily the book, but the movie too) and À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. He is no doubt aware of the superficial similarities between the two. Both Michael Crichton and Proust take on the inherently problematic emotional imperative to recover elements of lost time. Both make liberal use of long, discursive passages of philosophical explication during which the narrative action—characteristically at once minimal and lengthy—grinds to a halt. (In Mr. Crichton's case, this is usually a screeching one, quite literally.) However, with his fine eye for a true lie, Mr. Cameron also probably realizes that such a comparison leads up a blind alley. While Proust is concerned with the uncertainties of the past, Mr. Crichton in his fiction balances the theoretical unpredictability of the future against the sure bet that in real life his efforts will yield buckets of money.

The Lost World is Mr. Crichton's sequel to the enormously successful Jurassic Park, and despite the contention of Ian Malcolm, the fictional mathematician and chaos theorist who barely survives both books, that "sequelae are inherently unpredictable," it is a sure bet. The wily velociraptors are back. So are the poultry-sized procompsognathids (à la recherche du Frank Perdue). There is a group of good-guy researchers (with the exception of Malcolm, different ones from those in Jurassic Park, but, given the rather cursory nature of Mr. Crichton's portrayals of personality, for all intents and purposes the same). There are also two kids, and a villain who is equally devoid of ruth and clue. The plot is slower to start this time around, but it can afford to be, since, the mask of inherent predictability notwithstanding, we know what's coming. It is, however, substantially similar, and since its pleasures are those of a thriller, for review purposes let that suffice.

The most interesting difference between those otherwise twin heavyweights (Jurassic Park and The Lost World, not Proust and Mr. Crichton) is the development of the raptors as characters. Owing to the fact that in the strictest scientific sense virtually nothing is known for certain about dinosaurs other than that they had skeletons and were very, very thin on one end, thicker in the middle, and then very, very thin again on the other end, they are unusually adaptive fictional symbols, whatever their success in Darwinian terms. (In The Dechronization of Sam Magruder, the forthcoming posthumous novel by the preeminent paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, for example, they are unregeneratively cold-blooded and dullwitted.) And as the reverse sexual harassment theme in Disclosure and the enthusiastic if imperfectly absorbed assimilation of chaos theory in both dino-fictions attest, Mr. Crichton is not one to let shame avert him from mining a hot-button trend. (This is not to say that Mr. Crichton may not feel some ambivalence. It is interesting to note that in The Lost World the villain, Lewis Dodgson, makes his living taking over the completed, successful intellectual property of others and customizing it slightly to make a profit, much as Mr. Crichton does. I should emphasize that I actually enjoy Mr. Crichton's work very much, and not just his books; I think that E.R., which he also created, is the best show on television.)

In any event, the hot-button trend slot in Jurassic Park was shared by the conceit that dinosaurs were warmblooded, quick and intelligent and by the implications of chaos theory for the human endeavor. This is, incidentally, a subject that, forget Proust, is handled similarly in Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia, only without dinosaurs and with exquisite rather than late-capitalist economy. The Lost World, while retaining these themes, also addresses the implications for social structure of chosen as opposed to determined behaviors; this is by extension a motif in Arcadia as well. (Paging James Cameron; Mr. Cameron, please go to the white comparative literature telephone. Actually, given the predominant attributes of Mr. Stoppard and Mr. Crichton, I like to imagine one laughing, and the other on the way to the bank.) And if the implications for social structure of chosen rather than determined behavior does not sound like a hot-button trend to you, think of welfare reform and family values as you read the following explanation of raptors in The Lost World. Bear in mind that the book has already made clear that there are high levels of raptor-on-raptor violence, and that a raptor has attempted a carjacking.

In a sense, among higher animals adaptive fitness was no longer transmitted to the next generation by DNA at all. It was now carried by teaching…. Such actions implied at least the rudiments of a culture, a structured social life. But animals raised in isolation, without parents, without guidance, were not fully functional…. These newly created raptors came into the world with no older animals to guide them, to show them proper raptor behavior. They were on their own, and that was just how they behaved—in a society without structure, without rules, without cooperation. They lived in an uncontrolled, every-creature-for-himself world where the meanest and nastiest survived, and all the others died.

As Mr. Cameron might point out, while the 18th-century poet Christopher Smart considered his cat Jeoffry and saw the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving Him, Michael Crichton considers raptors and sees the urban underclass. Never mind that Mr. Crichton, in conjuring un monde rather than les temps perdu, is evoking by his title both Arthur Conan Doyle and the films of Wallace Beery and Jill St. John, making his novel, as it says on the lava lamp box, simultaneously prehistoric and postmodern. This passage from The Lost World, among others, implies that the end result of such animal behavior would be unilateral extinction of the species. In this context, it is not a pretty picture. I also take exception to the part Mr. Crichton, while decrying the Internet, lays the blame for global proliferation of Benetton, McDonald's and the Gap at the door of the mass media. (As a member of the mass media, I am willing to accept responsibility for the attrition of regional dialects, but Benetton? Even so culturally nostalgic a writer as Neil Postman doesn't go that far.)