It’s the approach here that varies rather than the theme. Still, a wide sampling from a promising talent.
A first collection of ten stories that explore modern romance and physical intimacy in a variety of styles and approaches, most often discovering a love that feels ancient.
The title piece is a love story that starts at a Safeway. It’s modern both in the way the lovers exchange their flirtations (AOL instant messaging) and in sexual preference (two men), but nevertheless it aims at purity and nostalgia by making its target the lovers’ first kiss. Sometimes the stories here are straightforward, other times distant and nearly without character, as in “What I Wanted Most of All,” a meditation that tries to demonstrate that one’s sexual indoctrination and career form a distinct narrative that touches everything else in one’s life as well. The dreamy pieces are the ones that please the most here, as though the very depersonalization of the tales makes their truths more intimate. There are echoes of Steve Dixon’s tone in works like “Twenty-Six Hours, Twenty-Five Minutes,” another dreamy monologue from bachelors trying to build a vocabulary for the dos and don’ts that make the ground rules of modern dating, and “Sweet Nothings,” in which an accidental compliment paid to a stranger in a restaurant is a springboard for a distant, almost characterless treatment of lonely affection. Other stories follow a woman whose romantic life seems to run parallel to events in pop culture (JonBenet, Princess Di), and a man who conducts a flirtatious relationship with a woman not his wife. Themes never stray far, as when a man in “Anything But a Gentleman” finds himself lingering over the picture of a woman in a magazine: “He wanted the end of all of that emotion that was the impetus of the sexual desire, the reason for the thrill of looking at the picture in the first place.”
It’s the approach here that varies rather than the theme. Still, a wide sampling from a promising talent.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-55597-379-5
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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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