An abundance of fine, sharp moments proving that Leavitt, despite his characters' tedious obsession with youth and beauty,...
Gay fiction’s elegant stylist (Martin Bauman, 2000, etc.) returns with an uneven, mutable collection of nine stories inspired by his deep biographical readings of Oscar Wilde's circle—and by profound sympathy for an aggrieved present-day gay community.
Leavitt moves from past to present, as well as from voice to voice, with the fluid grace of an expert novelist. In the first and most successful piece, “Crossing St. Gotthard,” which originally appeared in The Paris Review, he assumes E.M. Forster’s stately, ironical tone as a group of Americans traveling by train in Italy—the anxious widow Irene Pratt, her two scoffing sons, and their incipiently homosexual tutor Harold—each anticipate in her or his own way enclosure by the long Alpine tunnel. It is of course the tutor's voice that Leavitt rides out: a young man who reads Ovid to distract himself from his charge's Apollonian beauty, Harold cries out in silent anguish: “I belong to a different age!” This could be the author's cri de cœur. While “St. Gotthard” feels curtailed, as if the author had started a novel, then changed his mind, “The Infection Scene,” a long tale that attempts to link turn-of-the-century England to today's AIDS-devoured gay scene, loops and weaves interminably. The subject here is “Bosie” Douglas, the malevolent aristocrat who “corrupted” Oscar Wilde (or vice versa). As he’s following exhaustively Bosie’s coming-of-age seductions and later obsessive litigiousness, Leavitt flashes forward to mid-1990s San Francisco, where a young couple contemplate the politics of infecting each other. He mines deeply the sense of despair in the gay community: hate becomes disease, infection. In graceful, atmospheric love stories such as “Black Box” and “The Marble Quilt,” he introduces violent death of a partner not by AIDS to curious, suspenseful effect.
An abundance of fine, sharp moments proving that Leavitt, despite his characters' tedious obsession with youth and beauty, might be aging pretty well.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2001
ISBN: 0-395-90244-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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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