There are ghosts, too. At least, they seem like ghosts. Maybe they’re just wacky neighbors.
This collection of droll, wicked, and sometimes painfully funny stories, pastiches, and comic interludes could more appropriately have been titled something like “Stellar Screw-Ups On Parade.”
What’s also stellar is the manner in which Pendarvis, who has minted tales of the marginal, the weird, the hapless in such previous collections as Your Body is Changing (2007), somehow manages to be both caustic and compassionate in depicting his fumbling, comic characters. With most of these stories, he discloses how the movies, both in their myth and their melodrama, irradiate otherwise mundane or confused lives. In “Cancel My Reservation,” whose title is borrowed from a 1972 comedy that turned out to be Bob Hope’s last theatrical film, a small-town fellow who doesn’t seem to get out much decides he’s going to fly first class to Los Angeles to bid at an auction of Hope’s memorabilia. “They gave Chuck paddle 187, police code for murder,” the story relates in the sardonic tone that prevails over most of these tales. Chuck’s not exactly sure why he’s there beyond some impulse to snag an artifact for a friend who likes Hope. All one can safely say without spoiling things is that whenever you arrive in a strange place with no real direction, somebody will point you somewhere anyway, whether you like it or not. Similar unpleasant surprises happen to the sad-sack protagonist of “Jerry Lewis,” in which his search for a missing cat yields the realization that “he was happy being miserable. He was happy that living in Mississippi would give him a great excuse to be a failure.” Oh, and why is it called “Jerry Lewis?” Something to do with an open box of doughnuts, but that would be telling too much. And, as one might expect from such a collection, there’s a story called “Your Cat Can Be a Movie Star!,” in which another deluded dreamer seems to be one of those souls upon whom everything is lost. Such bleak hilarity may not be to everybody’s liking. But for those who have a taste for smoke-cured Southern droll, Pendarvis is among the more satisfying, laugh-out-loud absurdists a post-Millennial reader can ask for.
There are ghosts, too. At least, they seem like ghosts. Maybe they’re just wacky neighbors.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-938103-45-2
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
