Uneven, but Carter’s humor, insight, and lyricism win out over occasionally self-indulgent, obvious, or familiar moments.
Always interesting and sometimes dazzling, a collection of stories and fragments from the life of a self-destructive upper-middle-class bad girl.
Carter grew up in a privileged Upper East Side home, the daughter of feminist writer Anne Roiphe, and proceeded to explore other options, ending up an HIV-positive recovering junkie. Presumably autobiographical, these linked pieces about a recovering addict named Glory, set largely in New York City and Minneapolis (the addiction and recovery capitals of the nation, respectively), display an intimate and knowing familiarity with the life of the addict and the rehabs and 12-step groups it leads to. While the many short riffs, exercises in voice and mood—like the remarkable “East on Houston,” in which a young girl floats across Manhattan's Houston Street, borne on the voices of men reaching out to caress or assault—are hit-and-miss, the longer, more developed stories give the collection its real strength. Carter’s eye for detail and ear for the rhetoric of recovery, her feel for people trying to make sense of their lives, turn what could be amusing glosses into moving portraits. In “Parachute Silk,” Glory rejects the awkward advances of a recovering friend, sending him back to the comforts of his drug of choice. In “Zemecki’s Cat,” a recovering addict a few years sober walks through an austere and lonely life (his last girlfriend left a cat behind, with a note: “Here. Practice on this”), until circumstances open him to something like love. In the book's centerpiece, “The Bride,” a telescoped memoir of searching unhappiness, Glory’s mother, a swooning feminist, teaches her to look to men for definition, and Glory comes to see herself as the Bride of Frankenstein, fit only for the monstrous, misunderstood outcast, until a recovery epiphany born of a near suicide reveals to her her own humanity.
Uneven, but Carter’s humor, insight, and lyricism win out over occasionally self-indulgent, obvious, or familiar moments.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-56689-101-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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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