Interesting premises developed with varying success: an uneven yet promising first volume.
Ten debut stories find Western expatriates settled—and, more usually, unsettled—in 1990s Prague.
Several of the expats are gay men seeking love but making do with sex, mostly with unresponsive or emotionally neutral partners. The unnamed narrator of “Exile,” for example, is an American-Jewish artist who supports himself with pornographic drawings, checking out Czech males to little effect, and returning to the States still unsure whether he’s a real Jew. The protagonist of “A Man of the Country” achieves sexual gratification with Jirka, his affable, casually sensual English-language student—but realizes that he’s only a momentary blip on Jirka’s kaleidoscopic radar screen. And in “Garage Sale,” Canadian teacher Donald quietly accepts exploitation by both the male dancer who squeezes him for “loans” and the cultured woman whom he dutifully marries. Hamburger offers fairly conventional satire on outsiders otherwise attracted by Prague’s dark romantic history, such as Rachel (in “Jerusalem”), who finds herself drawn to an intense Jewish theology student yet finds the strength to dump him when she realizes his religiosity is her rival; and Debra (of “You Say You Want a Revolution”), “a rich girl in revolutionary’s clothing” whose fiery espousal of what she labels “New Socialism” alienates her from American friends and Czech colleagues alike. Such stories are less interesting than “Control,” which reveals the avaricious derelictions of a checkpoint security guard, and than the two best pieces here: “The Ground You Are Standing On,” about the tourist Sarah Schroeder, who discovers, in evidence of ongoing anti-Semitism, her determination “to become a better Jew”; and “Law of Return,” about the American Michael, who overcomes a lifetime of passive indecision by declaring his Judaism and moving with his male cousin (and lover) to Israel.
Interesting premises developed with varying success: an uneven yet promising first volume.Pub Date: March 16, 2004
ISBN: 0-8129-7093-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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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