Love Story for intellectuals.
What can you say about a pregnant ballerina who decides to have an abortion? Rather too much, as it turns out, in this fairly lugubrious fourth novel from the NBA-nominated author of The Diagnosis (2000).
Fifty-two-year-old Charles, our narrator, is a professor of English at a “leafy” liberal arts college who revisits his past and raises the ghost of his callow younger self when he attends his 30th college reunion. Lightman works in some intriguing material in the early pages, detailing middle-aged Charles’s interests in a biography of a sexually voracious but romantically unhappy German astronomer (who “made eros from science”), a fleetingly described feminist novel about women’s friendships, and his own not-uninteresting ruminations about the relativity and mysteriousness of the phenomenon of time. But Reunion eventually settles into a redundant replay of Charles’s college years during the time of organized protest against the Vietnam War: specifically, his love affair with Juliana, a gorgeous ballet student who simultaneously welcomes his sexual advances and holds him at a carefully maintained emotional distance. Charles is a potentially very interesting character: a collegiate wrestler and lover of poetry (his thesis subject is Emily Dickinson), but Lightman subordinates the more interesting aspects of this character’s mind and heart to Charles’s obsessive passion for the elusive Juliana. Occasionally, we get glimpses of the sadder-but-wiser older man observing “the beautiful twenty-two-year-old boy, full of magic and life and the power of not knowing the future”—especially in a climactic “meeting” between Charles’s two selves. But there’s too little variation overall from the central story’s very nearly suffocating abstraction, sentimentality, and banality. And there’s none of the conceptual excitement that made this author’s earlier books so stimulating.
Love Story for intellectuals.Pub Date: July 22, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-42167-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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