Blasé drifter, ne’er-do-well actor, and one-time Zima spokesman: Kareem is a Falstaff for strip-mall America.
Hilarious debut collection of linked stories, in which a Pakistani-American actor heads for Ohio and enters an absurdist comedy like no other.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar specializes in bad guys on TV crime reenactments, though he’s not getting a lot of work because he plays them too soulful. One day, “trying to get my mind off drinking by pouring hot coffee on my arm,” he gets an envelope in the mail from ex-girlfriend Eileen containing what most men would consider a bad combination: a one-way bus ticket to visit her in Ohio and a letter saying, “Good news. I’m through with big dicks and henceforth thinking constantly of you.” Within two pages, Kareem is out the door. Many authors would struggle fruitlessly to keep up with this opening scene, but neophyte Rahman seems to barely break a sweat as he keeps tossing one obscenely funny scenario after another at the reader. The stories drop down into Kareem’s random, often-drunk life at odd intervals, spaced out like moments of clarity in a lost weekend. Two episodes after he arrives in Ohio and gets taken by Eileen to dinner with her sister and a cannibal, our hero is working as a repo man for a video store chain, hunting down an errant Forrest Gump tape with his partner Valentina, who speaks only in movie dialogue. Meanwhile, Rahman washes it all in contemporary trash culture, from the tabloid shows Kareem used to work on to the dinner-theater musical version of Apocalypse Now he later appears in. This pop sensibility keeps the book from drifting off into airy absurdity. The writing zips along, fueled by a doomed, what-the-hell humor and a sharp eye for stretching things just the smallest tick past reality.
Blasé drifter, ne’er-do-well actor, and one-time Zima spokesman: Kareem is a Falstaff for strip-mall America.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-374-17401-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
