Squalor galore, for those who enjoy it.
The travails of a poor Florida family, chronicled in a debut collection of interconnected stories.
Buck Jackson, a vicious, womanizing alcoholic, beats his cringing wife Mary Carolyn (MC) while their 12-year-old daughter Georgia and her younger brother Sid cower under the coffeetable. Besides watching their parents fight, these unlovely brats have few amusements other than swimming and picking their scabs, which they munch potato-chip style. After brutal Buck threatens to leave MC on the grounds that she’s no fun anymore, Sid tries to distract him by hanging from the balcony of their 23rd-floor condo. Buck yanks him back but not before MC drives the family car into the ocean. It’s clear that this marriage can’t be saved. Still, life goes on. Georgia’s growing up fast, and she attempts to satisfy her burgeoning sexual curiosity by rubbing up half-naked against her drunken father. He rebuffs her, and MC flees with both children, even though she claims she doesn’t want a divorce. Georgia decides to live with Buck—a lowlife idyll that ends when her mother catches her watching porno movies with her loathsome dad and his repellent pals. Georgia continues to amuse herself by attracting and rejecting every red-blooded cracker within sniffing distance, including Oscar Love, a teenaged Lothario with a port-wine facial birthmark in the shape of Florida (the author is nothing if not loyal to her native state). Buck continues to drink, and smashes up a big ol’ car while carousing with his equally disgusting brothers. But colon cancer stops him in his tracks, and Georgia crashes his Olds in turn, upset when he enters the hospital for surgery. The grieving girl, now 15, consoles herself with a little meaningless sex with a scrawny construction worker. . . .
Squalor galore, for those who enjoy it.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-889330-56-6
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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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