The inherent drama of an artist and his hereditary demons is muffled in this poorly organized work.
Seven linked stories dip in and out of the life of a Native American, a talented artist when he’s not drinking.
Chuculate’s debut starts out well. For some historical/cultural perspective, he shows us four Cheyennes, thrilled by their discovery of the Gulf of Mexico. "Galveston Bay, 1826" is punchy and resonant. The next story ("YoYo"), set in 1970s Oklahoma, introduces the future artist, Jordan Coolwater. He’s in seventh grade, living in a small town with his impoverished grandparents. They have new neighbors, well-to-do black professionals. Their daughter YoYo is a sassy track star. She and Jordan hit it off. Class, race, prejudice, puberty—Chuculate finesses it all beautifully. Then come superficial character sketches of two uncles. Uncle Tony ("Winter, 1979") is a vicious racist; Johnson L. Freebird ("A Famous Indian Artist") is a hard-drinking blowhard. Neither story finds its rhythm. The longest story in this slim collection is "Dear Shorty," a rambling account of Jordan’s relationship with his father. Shorty is a far-gone alcoholic, a barber before he got the shakes and his wife left him. Jordan’s now a young man, with a joshing, nonjudgmental attitude toward Shorty. Ironically, their only bond is the bottle: “You can trace the progression of alcoholism in my family like a flying arrow and I’m the bull’s-eye.” A story that should have kept a tight focus on father and son veers off into Jordan’s troubles with the law and his escape from an Indian Detention Center. The focus in "Under the Red Star of Mars" is on Jordan’s future wife, Lisa Old Bull, about to ditch her abusive black boyfriend. Jordan, who’s selling everything at his breakthrough show, is a welcome contrast. In the title story, they’re married, but their baby is stillborn; Lisa leaves him and, in an ominous echo of Shorty’s affliction, the “tremors” stop Jordan painting and sculpting.
The inherent drama of an artist and his hereditary demons is muffled in this poorly organized work.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-57423-216-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Black Sparrow/Godine
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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