A first effort by a talented writer that tries too hard to be more than a collection.
A jumbled debut collection that offers up a mixed bag of Manhattan dwellers linked with one another through the Preemption, a brooding West Side apartment building.
Imagine collaboration between Gabriel García Márquez, Bret Easton Ellis, and Jay McInerney, and you have something of the flavor of these stories and their people—smart, trendy, clichéd, erotic, poignant, perverse, and larger than life. Six pieces combine into a kind of novella (“The Opals,” “Kissing In Manhattan,” “Duty,” “Telling It All To Otis,” “In Black,” and “The Green Balloon”), with the remaining five only tenuously joined to the whole. The “novella” concerns a domineering, sexually twisted Wall Streeter (Patrick) whose psyche was supposedly shattered in childhood by the accidental death of his brother. He delights in subtle bondage and collects women like trophies, one of them being Rally, a rather generic, pretty New York party girl. Patrick also makes visits to a priest in order secretly to scorn the Catholicism of his youth. Though rich, he has a roommate (James) who is his opposite: sweet, innocent, and insecure. Brutal complications ensue when Rally and James fall in love, but then the narrative trails off into sentimentality, predictability, and a strained allegory of the struggle between good and evil. The other tales concern men who dominate and confuse women (“Checkers and Donna”), women who dominate and confuse men (“The Smoker,” “Serendipity”), a tender bathing ritual (“Jacob’s Bath”), and an effective farce (“Fourth Angry Mouse”). These are stories that achieve their successes, when they do, through the deft craftsmanship of their prose and the surprises they spring on the reader. But their characters remain two-dimensional, existing mainly to serve semifantastical plot twists. Since they’re unrealized, their reappearance in different stories and at the Preemption feels like a mechanical linking device rather than a progressive development toward anything larger.
A first effort by a talented writer that tries too hard to be more than a collection.Pub Date: June 12, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-33566-0
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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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