As funny as it is, Singleton’s humor has a sharp edge, and his episodic account of life in the hinterlands is as poignant as...
Fourteen interconnected stories depict the strange and ineluctable process by which an odd teenager grows into a semi-serious young man.
Singleton’s (The Half-Mammals of Dixie, 2002) tales of the South are baroque enough to make Flannery O’Connor look like a Puritan—for, in the author’s eyes, South Carolina (his home state) is a phantasmagoria of dreamers, cranks, charlatans, rogues, and simple homegrown loonies. We see the world here through the eyes of Mendal Dawes, a hapless 15-year-old growing up in the small town of Forty-Five in the 1970s. Mendal’s father Lee—who buries fake barrels of toxic waste in his backyard, thinking it’ll deter property development—would probably be considered an oddball in Woodstock or the East Village, let alone Middle America. In Forty-Five, he’s not even an eccentric. This is a town where Mendal’s Little League coach (a mill worker with a penchant for self-inflicted wounds) has only one finger on his pitching hand—which may explain why the team has a record of losses rivaling the old Washington Senators or the earliest years of the Mets. Mendal naturally takes the world he was born into for granted, but there are times when he begins to wonder what he’s doing here—like when he concludes that Lee murdered his mother, or when the village idiot assaults him for working on a Sunday. Sensitive, intelligent, and fairly well-read (his father makes him recite passages from Durkheim or Marx before dinner each night), Mendal is not cut out for life in Forty-Five, where segregation is still a de facto reality and the students sell marijuana to their teachers. But what good is it to know about the larger world if you can’t get to it?
As funny as it is, Singleton’s humor has a sharp edge, and his episodic account of life in the hinterlands is as poignant as it is outrageous.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2004
ISBN: 1-56512-404-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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