Despite a certain repetitiveness, Marquart brings the rock ’n’ roll subculture to intense if desperate life.
Twenty-two stark, darkly tinted snapshots of life on the road, and occasionally at home, for small-time rock ’n’ roll musicians, singers, and hangers-on.
Marquart, who has toured with heavy metal bands, knows her territory and writes convincingly. The second story here, the brief, apocryphal “Dylan’s Lost Years,” sets the mood of hard-eyed romanticism, telling how the master was fired from a gig playing Holiday Inns because he “just could not sing.” Both Dylan and Holiday Inns appear from time to time in other pieces, Dylan as an ideal, the motel chain as a musical hell to be avoided at all costs, as if the musicians’ lives were not already hellish enough. Throughout, we’re treated to a litany of touring mishaps: vans break down en route to shows, equipment is ruined or lost, fires break out. Meanwhile, the disastrous inner lives of Marquart’s people get no relief from large quantities of alcohol, drugs, and tobacco. Although tales like “The Movie of the World,” in which a soundman may or may not blow his big chance when the drummer quits, are powerful individually, monotony sets in midway through. The names may change from story to story, but the characters don’t: the tough and lonely girl singer, the charismatic musician she and the audience can’t resist, the stoned loser who doesn’t have the necessary talent (sometimes doubling as the charismatic love object). Fortunately, Marquart reaches beyond the insular rock ’n’ roll world in the title story, which follows a young man named Sal in his dual careers as guitarist and cemetery monument salesman. Increasingly disillusioned yet enlightened, Sal evolves into the volume’s most fully realized character, and his sorrow lingers in the mind longer than every drug high and disaster.
Despite a certain repetitiveness, Marquart brings the rock ’n’ roll subculture to intense if desperate life.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-89823-209-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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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