Eleven stories set in Nevada, many of them about life in and around casinos, by the author of the novel Margins (1972), etc. Kranes writes in a telegraphic, disjointed style, a manner that is startling and effective in a set-piece such as ``The Black Friar of Fremont Street''—the tale of Call, an ordinary man who's hooked by the tables when his flight to Salt Lake City is diverted to Las Vegas. Like a jackhammer, Kranes's punchy sentences take Call all the way down, from his rich eastern life to begging on the streets. The style is less successful in ``Slot Queen,'' however, the archetypal story of a woman with a legendary feel for imminent jackpots. Kranes strives for metaphysical effects, and the piece can't bear such freight. Similarly, ``The Phantom Mercury of Nevada,'' invoking Nevada's UFO mythology, hovers uncertainly between realism and the surreal, and fails to convince on either level. It's about some wild teenagers who investigate reports of cattle mutilations, only to discover that an old Mercury and its ghostly inhabitant are responsible. Kranes offers up a nice romance in ``Nevada Dreams,'' about a dealer, Nevada, and two pugnacious men who vie for her, and in ``The Whorehouse Picnic,'' perhaps his best effort, he combines a love story with a schizophrenic man's obsession to build an atomic bomb. The volume's title refers to the most ambitious piece, here, ``Salvage,'' about a core-sampling crew's discovery of a sailing ship beneath the dead sea of Nevada. Their extraordinary efforts to raise the ship—and, metaphorically, sail it again—evoke an extraordinary series of reactions in the reader. Even so, the bold themes here need more explication; the tale would have been better served as a novel. An uneven and somewhat awkward collection. But Kranes working at his best is very good indeed.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-87417-287-X
Page Count: 186
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
