A bit darker and harsher, perhaps, than earlier collections, but on the whole pretty much the same kind of thing this writer...
Aging, estrangement, generational conflict, sexual rivalry, irrational violence—oh, and the destruction of the world as we know it: these are the recurring themes explored with mordant comic finesse in 16 exuberantly in-your-face stories.
The predilection for daft high-concept premises displayed in such previous collections as Boyle's If the River Was Whiskey (1989) is still very much in evidence: a female triathlete’s couch-potato boyfriend works out his hidden resentments (“She Wasn’t Soft”); a divorced bartender succumbs to the charms of his nubile neighbors, a houseful of college girls whose intimate moments are broadcast for Internet subscribers (“Peep Hall”); and scattered survivors in a brave new world decimated by an Ebola-like virus reenact the idyll shared by Adam and Eve, complicated ever so slightly by the presence of an angry Other Woman (the lively title story). Boyle gives us his own jaded takes on familiar literary classics—Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano is amusingly skewered in “Mexico,” and “The Black and White Sisters” impudently echoes William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”—and rewrites a lurid real-life tabloid story of several years ago in “The Love of My Life.” Feckless under-40s undergo farcical comeuppances in such haven’t-we-been-here-before productions as “Killing Babies,” “Death of the Cool,” and “Termination Dust.” Most interestingly, there’s a repeated focus on middle-aged and older protagonists rudely awakened to grim evidence of their failing powers and inescapable mortality—as witness to the stroke victim who lies undiscovered in his backyard even after his wife stumbles to his aid (“Rust”), the aging novelist who tries and fails to reconcile with his resentful estranged son (“Achates McNeil”), and the ghost who watches sorrowfully as his surviving spouse grows ever further distanced from reality (“My Widow”).
A bit darker and harsher, perhaps, than earlier collections, but on the whole pretty much the same kind of thing this writer has been cranking out since the late ’70s. If you like Boyle, you won’t be able to resist.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-03005-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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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