Well told but let’s hope it’s just a warm-up for the big business novel Charters clearly has in him.
Debut British paperback entitled No Tears: Tales from the Square Mile, now renamed and seen here in hardcover, contains a portfolio of stories set against the world of London high finance.
These brief, pointed stories nearly all turn on deception. The first, “Diary,” tells of a marketing director (MD), an incipient alcoholic whose marriage looks clearly out of hand. In “Dinner Party,” Richard is invited to a dinner given by his ex-girlfriend and attacked by the guests for his downsizing of various companies; he turns the tables, but not endearingly to the reader. In “Team Move,” a female MD tries to hijack her team and sell it, along with herself, to a rival firm—but all is not as she hopes. “Infatuation” plays out in e-mails across an open office space between another MD, 15 years older than the young woman being seduced; it blooms with dizzy love until the O. Henry ending when we discover a disconcerting fact about the MD. “Smart People” tells of an interview at Barton’s (a firm that often pops up in these stories): three young candidates await their interview, one of them intimidating the other two. When the intimidator is called in first for the interview, he learns something he can’t pass onto the other two without deceiving them about it. Several of these tales would make good opening chapters for a novel, which is what readers will find themselves hungering for as the stories suck them into varied climates and machinations of high finance. “Takeover,” for instance, tells in sweeping gestures of a German company taking over a British company, calling a meeting of the directors of the Investment Banking Department, and letting them face the inquisitorial representative of the German company, who is intent on firing the whole bunch. So it goes when playing the game of lawsuits, mergers, and getting the inside track.
Well told but let’s hope it’s just a warm-up for the big business novel Charters clearly has in him.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-33381-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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