Sluggish pace and colorless prose don’t add up to much of a mystery, in this seventh novel from the author of Suspicion...
What if a happy gang of teenagers take a vow in 1972 to reunite twenty years later, and one of them seems to have vanished?
Whatever happened to Angel Busky? Beautiful Angel was sexually adventurous, collecting high-school virgins just for the fun of it, planning to have six children by six different men, and the like. Two decades later, Willa, the smart girl of the ragtag group, wonders about her erstwhile bosom buddy. Willa’s become the writer of a tell-all biography of Ivy Compton-Burnett, which has inexplicably found avid readers. At a book signing, she runs into still-handsome Patrick, another member of the gang, now an NYU professor. He doesn’t know what became of Angel, either, but they catch up on bad boy Caleb; Jeremiah, the virgin geek; Shake, the harmonica player; Vinny, the tough-talking guinea; and Travis, the stoner. Willa wants to dig deeper, being no stranger to the dark side of human nature: Her husband Simon, a criminal lawyer, died when a tenement, the site of his love nest with a lady judge, collapsed. Willa was shattered but she keeps busy raising her 14-year-old daughter Chloe—and fretting lately about the pretty teenager’s sudden interest in a delivery boy. She hires p.i. Jovan Luisi to find Angel or figure out what happened to her, not knowing that the taciturn investigator is instantly smitten with her. There’s a long road ahead, covering everyone’s post–high-school history: Travis builds abode houses in the Southwest; Caleb married a rich widow and got into unsavory schemes; Vinny has a gas station and auto-repair shop; Shake still makes that old harmonica moan and wail. But what about Jeremiah? He was always a little strange, but now . . . . Some screaming, some skulking around in the woods, until the not-surprising truth is revealed in a lackluster denouement.
Sluggish pace and colorless prose don’t add up to much of a mystery, in this seventh novel from the author of Suspicion (1999), etc.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-0599-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
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
In a neighborhood where pain—"adult pain that rested somewhere under the eyelids"—is as pervasively omnipresent as the loveliness of May's green shade trees, death and its omens can be accepted as another face of God. But in the closed black community of the high hill overlooking a white Ohio town, there are two who stand outside the defensive webs of familial interdependence. There is mad Shadrach, victim of World War I, who defies death's capricious obscenity by ringing his bell for National Suicide Day every year—and one year he has some takers. And Sula, who will die, not like "other colored girls" rotting like a stump, but falling "like a redwood." For she is the product of a "household of throbbing disorder" and had learned isolation and the "meaningless of responsibility" early when she accidentally caused the drowning of a little boy. Intemperate, restless, Sula had some of the arrogance of her one-legged grandmother Eva. It was Eva who had long ago pondered the meaning of love when she used her only food (lard scrapings) to cure her baby boy's bellyache; yet when her son was a man, regressing to the womb of drugs, she burnt him to death. Sula also watched her mother die in flames, conscious only that she wanted the dying dance to go on. She left the village and returns to become the community's unifying evil—but will the people eventually love one who stood against the sky? Miss Morrison, author of The Bluest Eye (1970), in her deceptively gentle narrative, her dialogue that virtually speaks from the page, and her multilayered perceptions drawn through the needle's eye of any consciousness she creates, is undoubtedly a major and formidable talent, and this is an impressive second novel.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1973
ISBN: 0375415351
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1973
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