LaSalle’s stories are subtle, evocative, haunting—and brilliantly written.
A beautiful collection of 11 stories focusing on love, loss and—as the subtitle suggests—dreams.
LaSalle tends to focus on small events that paradoxically give life meaning—or at least cause his characters to question life’s meaning. The opening story provides the title for the entire volume, and it’s stunning. In a series of numbered paragraphs, the narrator recounts a brief encounter with a woman, a copy editor with runway model looks. They’ve met briefly before in Los Angeles but have a one-night fling in New York City when he’s visiting the East Coast. While he seems to find out a lot about her, he discovers later that she’d taken her life and realizes how little he actually knew. Another brilliant story about relationships is “Tell Me About Nerval,” in which a young college student, self-described as a “bonehead sociology major” at Cornell, goes to live with Billy, her teaching assistant from a French literature course, when he’s awarded a grant to work on his dissertation in Paris. While there, she has a one-night stand with Alex, a handsome young Frenchman, at a shabby hotel in Montmartre. Later she learns that Alex preys on naïve American girls such as herself, but the lies she feels forced to tell Billy ultimately lead to the disintegration of their relationship. The story is a tour de force and a single, 18-page sentence long. “Oh, Such Playwrights!” examines the good and bad fortunes of three New York playwrights whose lives, we find toward the end of the story, have briefly but memorably intertwined.
Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-268-03392-7
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Univ. of Notre Dame
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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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