Easy, lively reading, with some affecting moments, but mostly these tales have all the substance of a plateful of bonbons.
The Cabal is a group of wealthy, influential residents of Jackson, Mississippi, who share the same shrink. When poet Caroline Jones arrives in town to teach at the college, she's thrust into the thick of it by attending the funeral of the Cabal's most prominent member, stage director and unqualified "Presence" Jean Lyles. A confrontation between Jean's young lover and her middle-aged, greedy sons is defused by the psychiatrist, Jim Jaspers, whose own wild behavior is a portent of disaster. After the funeral he gets even wilder, to the point that his clients worry he'll start spilling their nasty secrets. Soon Caroline is enlisted to help the rebellious daughter of another Cabal member and finds herself hot to trot with Jean's bereaved lover. Meanwhile, Jim is announcing to all that he's privy to the secrets of the universe, and powerful figures across the state are preparing to put him away, one way or another. In "The Sanguine Blood of Men," Caroline appears, pre-Jackson, as a frustrated screenwriter in San Francisco, fending off a pass from her would-be producer and sharing a house with a cousin she had looked up to since childhood. "Hearts of Dixie" portrays Jean's occasional typist, a depressed pro tennis player to whom she has entrusted a safe-deposit box full of frank letters to her family, never sent, and a pile of Krugerrands, with no instructions. And "The Big Cleanup" records the further adventures of Miss Crystal and Traceleen, for whom a makeover is the first step to solving their problems and everyone else's.
Easy, lively reading, with some affecting moments, but mostly these tales have all the substance of a plateful of bonbons.Pub Date: April 17, 2000
ISBN: 0-316-31491-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
IN THE NEWS
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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