The survival of the cynics—in an abrasively intelligent Darwinian debut collection. Gilbert's ten stories, framed by two that include the Gal†pagos Islands as a sometime setting, show us characters creeping and crawling along a bumpy course of moral evolution. Although they've reached a relatively advanced point as late- 20th-century humans, that achievement brings them little happiness. These highly evolved people, in fact, seem mostly corrupt, confused, or amusingly, consciously callous. Maybe they have to be like this—a barrelling fighter's instinct appears to be their main means of preservation and their last source of defense, and Gilbert's unsentimental probing of their chances is both raucous and searching. He's unafraid of ugliness, which lends his fiction realism and sardonic thrust. In ``Anaconda Wrap,'' for instance, the potentially clichÇd vignette of a has- been Hollywood producer's one-night stand with his assistant is redeemed, comically, not by true love but by the brio of a small yet brutish mishap: While selfishly lost in the throes of her passion, this cold, base young assistant accidentally breaks the bone in his finger. Another man caught in a midlife crisis (``At the DÇjÖ Vu'') concludes a hangover by throwing up underwater at a sunny island resort, then watches incredulously as multicolored fish (unavailable or uncooperative while he studiously snorkeled) arrive en masse to swallow his upchuck. But Gilbert's moral scale is more panoramic than just this, and he also writes persuasively about war's consequences, about the rude pragmatists who call themselves TV journalists, about the urge to kill, and about the difficulty of telling one's story—and being heard. Interplay between weary life-veterans and blameless or frightened neophytes gives much of his writing its zest. The subtle Darwinian thematic harmonies of the stories, suggesting Gilbert's promise as a novelist, also distinguish a book that gives this basic advice: ``Keep moving. Please keep moving. Just survive.'' To the cynics go the spoils.
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-84306-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
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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