A singular, if uneven, collection of tales with flashes of brilliance.
A debut volume of short stories explores Canadian Jewish identity.
Seven stories are offered here, united by the themes of religion, love, and outsiders. The collection opens with “Restaurants,” an intriguing tale about Sarah, a Jewish waitress who embarks on an affair with Samir, a Palestinian co-worker. Kreuter cleverly considers the fling from the perspectives of both lovers and David, Sarah’s boyfriend. This is followed by “Amsterdam,” which tells of three young Canadian Jewish men who take a detour from their visit to Israel to have a blowout in Amsterdam before heading home. They smoke weed and visit the red-light district—a generic tale but for the fact they are tormented by the memory of Anne Frank. Other stories include the offbeat “Searching for Crude,” about a wealthy CEO who is mesmerized by a guitarist named Crude and becomes obsessed with matching his musicianship, and “Ninety-Nine,” about two close friends who are riven apart when one chooses to become “a traditional Jewish woman.” The volume ends with a longer, yet somewhat nondescript, tale about a group of girls following a band across America. The collection shows signs of a burgeoning talent but lacks consistency. In the opening of the book, Kreuter’s writing is a potent cocktail of racial tension and carnal desire: “That first time he came inside her and his whole body emptied out, his history and sorrows and worries purged for what felt like the first time.” By the close, his prose is noticeably diluted. “Chasing the Tonic” offers a watery contemporary regurgitation of 1960s hippiedom: “What did he believe in? The open road, music, the night sky, that, as he put it more than once, ‘Music and dancing and the redistribution of wealth can change the world.’ ” Kreuter’s narratives always deliver strong, concise messages. For example “Searching for Crude” attacks the rapacious nature of capitalist endeavors. But as a new writer, he tends to unnecessarily telegraph this lesson: “He didn’t want to be Crude. He wanted to consume him, to take his unrefined magic and keep it locked in a safe.” The author should trust his readership and the strength of his storylines rather than feel the need to hammer his points home. Still, Kreuter’s writing at its best has an addictive intensity that will leave most readers wanting more.
A singular, if uneven, collection of tales with flashes of brilliance.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-988040-41-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Tightrope Books, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2019
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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