Mayes's debut of interconnected short stories explores the common themes of love and sexuality with a fresh new sensitivity. Omar and Bennie are the childhood friends whose wanderings, relationships, and loves make up this book as Mayes follows the lives of gay men from initial encounters with homosexuality to commitment to lifelong companions. He is especially strong in his descriptions of young boys' first experiences, which range from comic and obvious to sweet and subtle. During the summer of 1971 (``Peggy Hagerman's Bikini'') in Mud Lake, Mich., Omar and Bennie's fascination with a precocious neighbor evolves from stealing her bathing suit to wearing women's clothes to trying to con the town's teenage Don Juan into dating Bennie; in the end, their dress-up game proves more than a meaningless escapade. In ``International Male,'' an uncle tries to ease his gay nephew's transition into adulthood with honest advice like ``you got to know for sure [you're gay] before you go making plans.'' On a more subtle note, (``Cow Girl''), Omar's lover remembers the confusing sexual tension that coursed through the house when his cousin and her girlfriend screamed, laughed, and made rhythmic slapping noises behind the guest bedroom door—offering him a close-up glimpse at forbidden love. Mayes also paints convincing portraits of men struggling with their sexual identities: In ``Only in French,'' Omar, now a college student in Manhattan, unsuccessfully balances a girlfriend, love for his male roommate, and the disturbing news of a nearby murder during a gay-bashing spree. There are some flat and confusing moments in the finale, ``Saint Peter Cut to Pieces,'' with its visions of a dismembered saint, and the opening, ``Oblivion,'' with its disoriented old man and his retarded daughter. But elsewhere, when Mayes stays away from fantasy and illusion, his everyday shines with an extraordinary light. Gentle, endearing, sometimes campy, appropriately crass, often wry, always funny.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-55583-258-X
Page Count: 303
Publisher: Alyson
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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
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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