In a blue-gray bungalow on a lamppost-lined street in an unremarkable American neighborhood, squirms a man of sudden celebrity, Michael Crichton. The year just done was "pretty amazing," he says. The reason is that one book of his, Jurassic Park, became the biggest hit in movie history, and another, Rising Sun, was no slouch, and together they vaulted old writings even he had dismissed back onto bookshop shelves, where they became the stuff of authors' dreams: they were bought, not remaindered. There are 100 million copies of Crichton's books now in print.
"I'm still not accustomed to being recognized the way I am," he says. "It's nice, but I'm accustomed to not being noticed -- except by people who notice that I'm tall." Indeed, he has to duck to get under his own door. He is 6 ft. 9 in. You fear that if he fell down he would be out of town.
This week Crichton, 51, is publishing his 24th book, Disclosure (Knopf; $24; first printing: 750,000 copies). It is about sexual harassment; a female executive virtually manhandles a subordinate. The woman, scorned, ignores the facts and charges the man with stepping over the line. He fights back. Crichton says he got the idea from a friend, presumably male, who told him about an incident in the workplace. That was the seed, and then Crichton cogitated, watered it as you would a Ficus, which seems to be his method. The result is provocative, which seems to be his pattern. To read it in this charged climate makes a man want to holler, "Slap leather, boys, and head for that line of trees!" Acknowledges Crichton: "It has been suggested that now is the time for that long-postponed trip to the Australian outback." Instead he is bracing for the criticism that trails his books like gulls after a trawler.
The new novel was written in the tidy bungalow in Santa Monica, California. Crichton uses the place as an office; his home, his wife (the fourth) and his child (the first) are a mile and a half away. In his office sits the author, a student, a thinker, possessed of restless intelligence. He is the only person this person has ever interviewed whose answer to a question was "I don't know." That's inspired.
To catch a sense of Crichton, one must summon other failed physicians who ^ turned to fiction, though failed, perhaps, is the wrong word. Conan Doyle. More recently, Walker Percy. In The Moviegoer, Percy wrote of "the search." What's the search? Well, you poke about the neighborhood and don't miss a trick. Somehow, it all has to do with novelists trained in the field of science, men like Crichton who found science too unimaginative.
In the '60s he went to Harvard Medical School and swiftly became disillusioned. "I hated it, he says. "I'd go to the shrink, and he'd tell me that everybody hated it. Why? Well, you went through it to get your license. There was nothing to discuss. You went through the hazing to join the fraternity -- it was male-dominated in those days."
Regrets?