Tigerman impresses more by his ingenuity than his only serviceable prose. The latter, combined with breakneck cuts and...
A former astronaut and a plucky TV science reporter team up to expose a long-entrenched cabal.
Screenwriter Tigerman’s sprawling debut novel stretches back 30 years and makes countless quick cuts from (for starters) Texas to Australia, Antarctica, Ukraine, the moon, Mars, and multiple locations in Washington, DC. There, Angela Browning, reporter, host, and co-creator of the award-winning PBS series Science Horizon, receives a surprising package from an anonymous sender; it contains a CD-ROM with pictures of the surface of Mars, which resembles an ancient Egyptian landscape. When official government response to her inquiries proves suspiciously evasive, Angela and her producer Miriam Kresky contact Jake Deaver, maverick former astronaut and fervent Egyptologist. Their probing stirs up enough interest to merit nonstop FBI surveillance bleary-eyed agents Stottlemeyer and Markgrin. The rest of the complicated plot swirls all around them (N.B. Jake and Angela also become lovers.): Flashbacks from 1973 and 1993 pinpoint dicey moments in NASA’s missions to the moon and Mars, respectively, and one of Jake’s colleagues, Colonel Augie Blake, “the last man to walk on the moon,” now works for NASA. Uncertainty about his honesty with Jake adds some tension, while the accelerated melting of ice in Antarctica gives worry to Americans stationed there and some former Soviet scientists continue work on technology to counter SDI, though the Cold War is long over. Key answers rest with “odd bird” researcher Richard Eklund and colleagues, entrusted with a covert project called Mars Underground. The explanation of the Mars pictures comes to the reader in tiny pieces, and, surprisingly, it has serious ramifications for the presidency. There are amusing cameo appearances by Jimmy Carter and Neil Armstrong.
Tigerman impresses more by his ingenuity than his only serviceable prose. The latter, combined with breakneck cuts and jumps, works against reader interest and makes plot pretty hard to follow.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2003
ISBN: 0-380-97670-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
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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