Satire both hilarious and profound, peppered with a few near-misses that border on the glib.
Comic Southern writer’s debut collection presents a sardonic view of the tics and foibles of the odd, inept, unhappy and underemployed.
Pendarvis’s collection includes two tales focusing on superheroes, one fictitious literary catalogue, a made-up “contributors” section, a few letters to the editor and the titular novella, among other things. The result is a charming pastiche of Southern wit, with characters evoked through humorous asides and eccentric tendencies. Pendarvis adopts a dry-eyed, aw-shucks tone through consciously amateur writing, highlighting the characters’ endearing humanity even as it gently ribs them. “The Pipe” sets up a drama of Beckettian absurdity, as two characters, known only as “the security guard” and “the paramedic,” guard the air pipe that feeds a radio deejay buried alive as a promotional stunt. The deadbeat paramedic and the naïve though noble security guard have bizarre brushes with love, loneliness, sex, power and death, all in the service of someone who may or may not be at the pipe’s other end. The other standout piece is the novella, whose protagonist is an amateur historian attempting to pen the dreary story of his nowhere town, Newberry, after being fired from his job. His efforts and academic pretensions are hilariously inept, though he maintains an incongruent optimism as he suffers derision at home, lusts creepily after his young sister-in-law and encounters innumerable miscreants who mean him various degrees of harm. While the literary jabs found here are highly entertaining (one disgruntled reviewer of an invented book remarks, “Kirkus Reviews is going to eat this shit up”), it’s the depictions of fragile humanity and the subtle social critiques that are truly affecting.
Satire both hilarious and profound, peppered with a few near-misses that border on the glib.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2005
ISBN: 1-59692-128-5
Page Count: 198
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
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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