Fourteen stories from the prolific Slavitt (Lives of the Saints, 1990, etc.)—a mix of a few experiments with a number of loosely plotted meditations on the long-term depression that follows a midlife divorce and intergenerational tension. The title story, including footnotes, does a ``Lost in the Funhouse'' Barthian turn in an account of a writing teacher in New York who is faced with urban brutality—both in his own experience and through the fiction of his students. ``The Imposter'' is a lively, inventive story in which the narrator, a writer's brother, learns in life why writers enjoy playing roles, because it creates ``a kind of fun, a peculiar liveliness and intensity, that comes with imposture.'' ``Grandfather'' is a moving story about a narrator, divorced from a still-bitter woman, who returns to attend his grandson's bris and comes to a reconciliation with his feelings. Several of these family meditations work metaphorically and occasionally dazzle with their aphoristic prose: ``The trick, though,'' says the narrator of ``Simple Justice,'' a tale about forgetting the familial past, ``may be not to pay too close attention, to see things without looking too hard.'' Though a few of the pieces seem sketched out without being fully developed, they maintain a hard-edged balance between humor and despair for the most part. While an experiment like ``Instructions''—a list—can be clever and amusing but too smug (``I'm being the smart-ass author, screwing around and playing games''), others like ``Conflations''—an elderly relative mistakes a man for his dead father—capture the rhyme and reason of life's messiness. ``Wherever you are, that's the foreground, and you never get to that wonderful faraway place where lives all come together.'' Slavitt, while repetitive and too leisurely at times, is worth reading for moments such as that.
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1991
ISBN: 0-8071-1665-3
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1991
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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