Twelve stories, mostly depicting life among intellectually and emotionally overwrought young people in present-day America. Almost all the characters who roam these pages suffer from some intense malaise, real or imagined, that prevents them from discerning any purpose in their own lives—and keeps them from communicating as much to the reader. Domestic life is usually futile: the schizophrenic narrator of “The Season’s Condition,” for example, drives her sister to distraction with her delusions, while the wife of “An Interview With My Husband” is obsessed with losing her younger Argentinian husband to another woman. Erotic life is largely as unsatisfying. The nearly blind art scholar of “Blind—compensates for her failed marriage with a succession of pointless love affairs; the beautiful narrator of “Where All Things Converge” dedicates herself to a life of celibacy after losing her faith in God; and the clueless intellectuals of “Our Perversions” attempt, without much success, to find an ontological significance in their sex (—We have our desire. We name it, then move into it so that it cannot move into us and make us who we are not: a man and a woman hiding from unquenchable desire—). The mendacity of the rich is also a common theme. The fable “An Obscure Geography,” for instance, tells of the ultimate revenge of a troubled schoolteacher who loses her job at the hands of a wealthy, bratty student, while the title story relates the history of a young, rich, Wasp-y banker who falls disastrously in love with a free-spirited woman (—half Peruvian or Bolivian—we cannot remember which—) who scandalizes his family. Apprentice work of some depth but no great originality. Di Blasi (the novellas Drought & Say What You Like, 1996) shows a talent for narration, but most of her central dichotomies (sex vs. love, money vs. freedom, etc.) are obvious, annoying, and very old-hat.
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-56689-083-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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