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
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.
One of America’s great novelists (Lost Memory of Skin, 2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.
Don’t expect atmospheric mood poems or avant-garde stylistic games in these dozen tales. Banks is a traditionalist, interested in narrative and character development; his simple, flexible prose doesn’t call attention to itself as it serves those aims. The intricate, not necessarily permanent bonds of family are a central concern. The bleak, stoic “Former Marine” depicts an aging father driven to extremes because he’s too proud to admit to his adult sons that he can no longer take care of himself. In the heartbreaking title story, the death of a beloved dog signals the final rupture in a family already rent by divorce. Fraught marriages in all their variety are unsparingly scrutinized in “Christmas Party,” Big Dog” and “The Outer Banks." But as the collection moves along, interactions with strangers begin to occupy center stage. The protagonist of “The Invisible Parrot” transcends the anxieties of his hard-pressed life through an impromptu act of generosity to a junkie. A man waiting in an airport bar is the uneasy recipient of confidences about “Searching for Veronica” from a woman whose truthfulness and motives he begins to suspect, until he flees since “the only safe response is to quarantine yourself.” Lurking menace that erupts into violence features in many Banks novels, and here, it provides jarring climaxes to two otherwise solid stories, “Blue” and “The Green Door.” Yet Banks quietly conveys compassion for even the darkest of his characters. Many of them (like their author) are older, at a point in life where options narrow and the future is uncomfortably close at hand—which is why widowed Isabel’s fearless shucking of her confining past is so exhilarating in “SnowBirds,” albeit counterbalanced by her friend Jane’s bleak acceptance of her own limited prospects.
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-185765-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
Superb stylist L’Amour returns (End of the Drive, 1997, etc.), albeit posthumously, with ten stories never seen before in book form—and narrated in his usual hard-edged, close-cropped sentences, jutting up from under fierce blue skies. This is the first of four collections of L’Amour material expected from Bantam, edited by his daughter Angelique, featuring an eclectic mix of early historicals and adventure stories set in China, on the high seas, and in the boxing ring, all drawing from the author’s exploits as a carnival barker and from his mysterious and sundry travels. During this period, L’Amour was trying to break away from being a writer only of westerns. Also included is something of an update on Angelique’s progress with her father’s biography: i.e., a stunningly varied list of her father’s acquaintances from around the world whom she’d like to contact for her research. Meanwhile, in the title story here, a missionary’s daughter who crashes in northern Asia during the early years of the Sino-Japanese War is taken captive by a nomadic leader and kept as his wife for 15 years, until his death. When a plane lands, she must choose between taking her teenaged son back to civilization or leaving him alone with the nomads. In “By the Waters of San Tadeo,” set on the southern coast of Chile, Julie Marrat, whose father has just perished, is trapped in San Esteban, a gold field surrounded by impassable mountains, with only one inlet available for anyone’s escape. “Meeting at Falmouth,” a historical, takes place in January 1794 during a dreadful Atlantic storm: “Volleys of rain rattled along the cobblestones like a scattering of broken teeth.” In this a notorious American, unnamed until the last paragraph, helps Talleyrand flee to America. A master storyteller only whets the appetite for his next three volumes.
Pub Date: May 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10963-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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