Irreverent humor doesn't compensate for insubstantial characters, nor does some mildly endearing self-deprecation redeem...
A bumbling antihero struggles for a little peace and quiet in the dystopian near future imagined by Knipfel (Noogie’s Time to Shine, 2007, etc.).
Following “the Horribleness,” a mysterious attack in Tupelo, Miss., which has been used by the government as an excuse to wage a pointless war, citizens live under constant surveillance and the fear of being branded as potential terrorists. Corporatization has invaded everything, including (thanks to implants) the skulls of all good citizens. Personal communication devices called “VidLogs” are “more mandatory than pants.” A run-in with a member of the Stroller Brigade, an organization of sadistic mothers who bully childless citizens with razorblade-fitted perambulators, lands Wally on the wrong side of the law. He’s had enough: his loveless marriage, the constant commercials blaring inside his head, the nosy neighbors bent on ratting out nonconformists to the authorities—they all combine to drive Wally to attempt the unthinkable. He removes the implanted chip designed to make him a good citizen, rendering himself for all practical purposes invisible. Through a series of strange coincidences, Wally meets an entrancing hippie and a wisecracking dissident cowboy; they introduce him to a band of subterranean Luddites with designs on taking the world back to simpler, pretechnological, preauthoritarian times. But are the revolutionaries what they claim? Is their work that of true patriots or the criminally insane? Like Wally, readers are constantly befuddled by a surreal landscape, a cartoonish cast and a catalog of corny acronyms: SUCKIE (Single Universe Citizen Identification) cards, “SMEG/MA” (Salacious Materials Enforcement Group Metropolitan Area), etc. Thinly veiled allegories for 9/11, the Patriot Act and other contemporary phenomena bludgeon rather than enlighten. Wally and his merry band of “Unpluggers” drift in an amalgamation of themes borrowed from Orwell, Vonnegut and other masters of dystopian literature toward the inevitably cynical conclusion.
Irreverent humor doesn't compensate for insubstantial characters, nor does some mildly endearing self-deprecation redeem this satire's aimlessness and lack of engagement.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9284-6
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
One of the most bittersweet love stories in modern memory and a book to savor even while despairing of its truths.
Hamid (Discontent and Its Civilizations, 2014, etc.) crafts a richly imaginative tale of love and loss in the ashes of civil war.
The country—well, it doesn’t much matter, one of any number that are riven by sectarian violence, by militias and fundamentalists and repressive government troops. It’s a place where a ponytailed spice merchant might vanish only to be found headless, decapitated “nape-first with a serrated knife to enhance discomfort.” Against this background, Nadia and Saeed don’t stand much of a chance; she wears a burka but only “so men don’t fuck with me,” but otherwise the two young lovers don’t do a lot to try to blend in, spending their days ingesting “shrooms” and smoking a little ganga to get away from the explosions and screams, listening to records that the militants have forbidden, trying to be as unnoticeable as possible, Saeed crouching in terror at the “flying robots high above in the darkening sky.” Fortunately, there’s a way out: some portal, both literal and fantastic, that the militants haven’t yet discovered and that, for a price, leads outside the embattled city to the West. “When we migrate,” writes Hamid, “we murder from our lives those we leave behind.” True, and Saeed and Nadia murder a bit of themselves in fleeing, too, making new homes in London and then San Francisco while shed of their old, innocent selves and now locked in descending unhappiness, sharing a bed without touching, just two among countless nameless and faceless refugees in an uncaring new world. Saeed and Nadia understand what would happen if millions of people suddenly turned up in their country, fleeing a war far away. That doesn’t really make things better, though. Unable to protect each other, fearful but resolute, their lives turn in unexpected ways in this new world.
One of the most bittersweet love stories in modern memory and a book to savor even while despairing of its truths.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-73521-217-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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