A sharp, melancholic, and knowing addition to the long shelf of Angeleno literature.
These 10 interconnected stories trace a web of Hollywood relationships, revealing how careless decisions can have repercussions for decades—on and off the big screen.
The book opens with 72-year-old Lee Rockwell, an over-the-hill actor who used to star in Westerns in which his characters often died. His one-time affair with his co-star, Harry, broke up both their families—a doubly painful memory now that Harry has just died of old age. Harry’s funeral also haunts other characters, who go on to make cameos in one another’s stories. Thonson offers acrobatic dialogue in scenes that feel both realistic and satirical. Many of his interactions have the terse, economical style of the late Raymond Carver’s work. Even the subtlest lines carry power and significance: “You have to come all the way out here just to see the stars these days,” ponders Pettus, a homicide detective who drives into the country for target practice in the middle of the night. Thonson’s Los Angeles is a place of dysfunctional, pill-popping families and sociopathic drifters. In “Western,” a wayward youth squats at a dead man’s house before ultimately deciding to burgle it. The protagonist of “Montage” gets into a fistfight in the middle of the highway with a group of privileged Iranian thugs. That same story features the recurring line, “Never take a meeting with the man who has murdered your wife,” which sounds figurative at first—until the murder turns out to be literal. Hope and reconciliation seem unlikely in such a sordid world, but Thonson sprinkles his stories with moments of moving decency. The final tale, for example, depicts a startling tryst between Victor, a polio-afflicted seismologist, and Nora, his childhood neighbor; their meeting is desperate, unexpected, and perfectly encapsulates the book’s sad romance. At first glance, the book’s title has the noirish ring of a B movie. But as these world-weary characters discover, dying of love would be a blessing.
A sharp, melancholic, and knowing addition to the long shelf of Angeleno literature.Pub Date: May 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-1460928745
Page Count: 240
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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