Bizarre.
A debut collection of short stories by Quatro that's more confusing than profound.
A married woman tells her mother about her phone-sex relationship with another man; the same woman returns home with her husband to find her dead lover in their bed and watches as her husband lies down beside him; a grueling race is held in which each entrant must carry a metal statue with an erect penis; a woman dying of melanoma struggles to survive, and her husband wrestles with his conscience; an old woman, determined to mail a letter to the president, embarks on a final journey to the post office; the married woman winds up having phone sex and ignores her children; a young girl, embarrassed by her quadriplegic mother, is forced by her grandmother to go to a pool party; other stories center around a deaf man who becomes a cult leader and a young man who has a sinkhole. Quatro’s stories range from the ridiculously strange to the seemingly normal, but there’s certainly nothing ordinary about this darkly themed, graphically sexual book. The stories, set in the area surrounding Lookout Mountain, Ga., rip apart the moral, familial and religious conventions of modern society. Nothing is sacred to the author, who possesses a prolific imagination but fails to connect with the average reader. The stories are interwoven in a manner that makes it extremely challenging for the reader to link the events and the characters, and the writing is often stilted and difficult to follow, at best. Readers who appreciate avant-garde prose and odd humor may find the stories appealing, but the author’s meandering style and strange content will prove too unconventional for others.
Bizarre.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2075-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
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
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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