Warm-hearted, earthy and sly. As enjoyable as a favorite relative who has all the dirt on the other family members in the...
Intimately told contemporary morality tales about the search for love and material success.
Through the voice of her engaging unnamed narrator—a wry, pretty much all-knowing observer who is mostly content to sit in the background and watch foolishness reach its inevitable conclusion—Cooper (Some People, Some Other Place, 2004, etc.) presents nine stories about young black women: Some make unfortunate choices; some make shrewd decisions; some read books and excel at school; some daydream of dreamboats with whom they sail away to the land of milk and honey. In all the tales, character is destiny, and the most fearsome enemy (vanity, greed, sloth) is found within. In “The Eye of the Beholder,” Lily Bea, a homely child with a bright spirit, is married off by her selfish mama to a nasty old man who owns a dry-cleaning business; only her love of books saves her from a life of slavish work and emotional abuse. Several stories follow a fabulist’s schema: In “As Time Goes By,” hard-working Willa Ways earns a Ph.D. and achieves acclaim in a distinguished career; her lazy sister, Futila Ways, uses her good looks to snare a husband, but winds up in a loveless marriage and an empty life. Other tales skewer the narcissism of successful young professionals who think so highly of themselves that they let love pass them by. What unifies and deepens these stories is the impish, ever-forgiving but gently judgmental narrator who doesn’t hold herself above the all-too-human impulse to share some really good gossip, as in “The Party,” a story about an evening at a nightclub that turns into an after-hours orgy. The morning after, the narrator winds up treating the participants at the family clinic where she works, doling out penicillin because someone reported a case of STD.
Warm-hearted, earthy and sly. As enjoyable as a favorite relative who has all the dirt on the other family members in the room.Pub Date: April 4, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-51133-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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