A routine thriller in surgical gear.
The overly long tale of a young doctor who gets caught up with the wrong woman in an ER, and of his subsequent efforts to redeem himself.
Newcomer Farris, a pediatric anesthesiologist, draws on descriptions of actual case histories to orbit the story of Dr. Malcolm Ishmail, now back practicing medicine in Nebraska for the ungodly rate of $43/hour thanks to a kid in Arizona who coded blue on him in the worst way, and just kept getting bluer and bluer. Flashback to the “The Book of Mimi,” the story of how Ishmail got there. It all begins with Mimi, Ishmail’s supervising surgeon when he’s a lowly post-grad. Mimi is Dr. Fatale, untalented but gorgeous, and eager to get into Ishmail’s jockstrap once she knows he’s a sensitive soul. She takes him on “an extended tour of the Land of the Erotic.” And while adventuresome sex is a good thing for its vulnerability, adventuresome surgery is not—which is what happens when an aneurysm goes sour on Mimi, leading to an “unfortunate outcome,” and Ishmail, who was participating, gets the third degree from folks looking into the case. Eventually, Mimi admits to Ishmail that sometimes she gets lost in the brain. Mimi’s skill had always been an issue, but will Ishmail snitch on her in the name of ethics, and because he’s really destined for a more wholesome other? Sure he will. And when Mimi hears of it, the affair’s over and she pulls off the kid gloves with a letter accusing him of inappropriate advances and involvement with illegal drugs. Once that’s over, we start up with the narrative that will lead to the bad blue-coding: Might it turn out that it was somehow Mimi’s doing, and that this might all end with gunplay? Don’t rule it out. Or might Ishmail one day find a way to make a more reasonable living as a doctor? Farris announces early that he hopes to give a more accurate account of an emergency room than E.R., but, really, Lie Stillis just a variation on its theme, accurate or no.
A routine thriller in surgical gear.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-050554-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
