Treat yourself to this one.
The intricate plotting of traditional noir novels (and perhaps specifically the honeycombed structures of James Ellroy’s contemporary updatings of them) are expertly echoed and parodied in this terrific second novel by Grand, author of the oddball Kafkaesque debut novel Louse (1998).
Set in a city much like 1930s New York, just after the repeal of Prohibition, it’s a vertiginously intricate tale that begins when 30ish Victor Ribe is released from prison after 15 years served for murders he didn’t commit. Grand weaves back and forth in time, patiently unearthing the buried connections among Victor’s drug-addicted past; incidents of strike and sabotage at the Fief munitions plant; ANB (Alcohol and Narcotics Bureau) Commissioner Harry Shortz’s compromised senatorial candidacy; physician-abortionists père et fils Jerome and Arthur Brilovsky and their intimacy with the circle of opium-addicted socialite art patron Celeste Martin; Fief dispatcher Freddy Stillman’s despairingly overextended long dark night of the soul; and the research of tough-gal reporter Faith Rapoport—whose father Sam had covered Ribe’s murder trial. By the time shady p.i. Benny Rudolph realizes he has “been taking part in a plot he couldn’t see clearly in his mind,” readers will have long since felt the same way. But Grand somehow pulls it all together, keeping us hooked with his zesty, over-the-top period prose (“He looked as sad as a clarinet with a splintered reed”) and lively array of mysteriously mutually involved suspicious characters. Grand’s brilliant plot is too . . . well, grand to give away. But you may as well know that crooked narcotics cops and politicos figure in it, along with several duplicitous dames who conceal rather more than their plunging décolletages might lead you to guess, and that if Victor Ribe (remember him?) actually was framed, it may have had something to do with the aftershocks of the Russian Revolution, and a purloined painting (entitled “The Disappearing Body”) executed, so to speak, by folk artist Evgeny Rodhinsky.
Treat yourself to this one.Pub Date: March 5, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-50034-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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