Dean has a fine appreciation for the way chance can save or doom careers and marriages. More, please.
An attractive wry humor ripples through this collection of ten stories, which follows Dean’s debut novel (The Madonnas of Leningrad, 2006).
The humor is evident in the opening story, “What the Left Hand Is Saying,” a cute riff on All About Eve. Tim, a seemingly innocent young charmer, makes friends with his neighbors in his New York building, then skewers them mercilessly at a comedy club and lands a slot on a cable channel. That’s show business. Performers also appear in “Romance Manual,” a decidedly unromantic account of a one-night stand on the road in Florida, and in “Dan in the Gray Flannel Rat Suit,” the longest piece by far, a bittersweet valentine to the acting profession (Dean is a former actor). In the story, Dan spends more time tending bar than acting, but he eventually gets a couple of breaks. Ironically, he sails through his audition for a challenging role in a hot off-Broadway play, but he messes up a dumb commercial. There’s high drama, too, in “The Queen Mother,” about a crisis intervention. A large Southern family is trying to steer its alcoholic matriarch into a rehab clinic; again, the humor is dark. There’s nothing humorous, however, about the midlife crisis of a successful Seattle lawyer in “The Afterlife of Lyle Stone”; the story suggests, chillingly, that the cure may be worse than the disease. That satisfying payoff is missing from “The Best Man,” in which a recovering alcoholic yearns fleetingly to stray from his happy marriage, and from “The Bodhisattva,” about a woman’s unrequited love for her former shrink. But everything comes together in the beautifully calibrated “Another Little Piece of My Heart.” For middle-aged Elaine, a chance encounter with her ex yields an unexpected journey into self-knowledge and maybe, just maybe, offers opportunity for a fresh start.
Dean has a fine appreciation for the way chance can save or doom careers and marriages. More, please.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-082532-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperPerennial UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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