Watch out: the invader from the north is just run-of-the-mill enough to be a smash.
A debut collection of Canadian fiction and an early novella from the northland’s chirpy hybrid of Bret Easton Ellis and Ethan Canin.
Novelist Taylor (Stanley Park, 2002) has won the Journey Prize, O. Henry awards, and Best Canadian Short Story awards. Here, the standouts are “Doves of Townsend,” about a woman who inherits a junkshop and discovers the unlikely truth about both being and buying an Object of Desire, and “Silent Cruise,” about a cockamamie scheme to recruit an idiot savant from the racetrack to the Vancouver stock exchange—with predictable results. But the bulk of the volume is the novella, “Newstart 2.0,” where we follow a high-school art student named Shane as he meets Dennis Kopak, one of those zany kids who wears a word that means “horseradish” on his clothes and talks mysteriously into a telephone that isn’t plugged in but somehow rings. Years later, after Shane tells us how he’s transcended nerd status to lay lots of international girls, we launch into the world of Phrate magazine, where Shane covers the art beat and blesses us with ideas like “What’s an original idea? Does it merely lack resemblance to any idea that has come before?” After all kinds of inconsequential travel writing and details about the Internet, Shane hits on a hot story about an artist who unsuccessfully tried to burn his life’s work and who is now represented by a guy with an agency named for horseradish. Kopak reappears but doesn’t recognize Shane, which is good for plot but bad for believability. Etcetera. Taylor’s stories in general are set in worlds that we’re led (by TV) to believe are possible, but aren’t. Taylor’s is a variety of hyperrealism, delivered with smartboy smarminess and decorated with product placement that will convince future archaeologists we lacked all aesthetic sophistication.
Watch out: the invader from the north is just run-of-the-mill enough to be a smash.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-58243-216-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
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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