Intellectually dazzling, emotionally chilly, and bound to provoke.
Nine intriguing debut pieces explore the point where art and life intersect—or collide—in the lives of artists, performers and movie characters.
While “Dream of a Clean Slate” examines Jackson Pollock’s last affair, it mainly contemplates how the painter’s unhappiness and frustration fed his art even as they destroyed him. The story asks, who is more authentic, the artist as person or the person as artist? “Elephant Feelings” juxtaposes a show elephant on Coney Island with a South African woman who was a freak-show attraction in France. According to Haskell, both loved and were discarded by the men who controlled their lives. Less fortunate than Pollock, they had no outlet for communicating their feelings and died broken-hearted. In “The Judgement of Psycho,” the Hitchcock movie is re-envisioned along with the role of Paris in the Trojan War. Haskell’s interest is the power of unattainable desire. “Crimes at Midnight” plays several riffs on Orson Welles films (including a walk-on by Janet Leigh) and on Welles himself as actor/character/creative force. These stories tend to be written in short segments, often seemingly unrelated. “The Faces of Joan of Arc,” for example, jumps from a discussion of Mercedes McCambridge as the devil in The Exorcist to a silent-screen version of Joan of Arc, to Hedy Lamarr as Delilah, to Godard’s wife (Anna Karenina) in a film persona as a prostitute. For Haskell, actors and their parts are seemingly interchangeable. “Capucine”—about the actress’s suicide–is one of the more unified stories, as is “Glenn Gould in Six Parts,” which also stands out for its few almost happy moments. “Good World” takes its cue from Aristotle’s pronouncement about habit as the foundation of virtue as it imagines the short life of the first Soviet dog in space and Richard III’s courtship of Anne. “The Narrow Road” shows the poets Basho and John Keats forced to choose between art and life.
Intellectually dazzling, emotionally chilly, and bound to provoke.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-17399-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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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