Dark, grim, and sardonically funny, Jodzio’s stories stick like gum to the side of your brain and won’t shake loose.
A breakout book of short stories that packs a wicked punch.
This is Jodzio’s third story collection (If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home, 2010, etc.). A Jodzio story’s lineage is by way of George Saunders, Kelly Link, and Mark Leyner. His roots are in flash fiction, and he has learned how to put a little more meat on those bones. These 17 well-crafted tales, most first person, most short, are tight, funny, and bizarre—each is its own absurd world made real. The characters are misfits and losers who can’t seem to get a break but remain hopeful dreamers. In the title story, two guys just post-rehab have discovered how to knock out animals using a Spock-like pinch behind the neck. When they try to do it on a neighbor’s tiger in order to sell it for drug money, things go terribly wrong. “The Indoor Baby” is about an agoraphobic woman who's convinced that the “womb is the most indoorsy organ of all” and won’t let her baby go outside. A son who runs his mom and pop's opium den must compete with a brand-new big-box Opium Depot store across the street. In “Ackerman Is Selling His Sex Chair for Ten Bucks,” the narrator misses Ackerman’s wife so much he has to buy something she once sat in. In “Duplex,” the longest story, a young man rents a room from Jayhole, a retired bounty hunter, whose previous roommate killed himself because he couldn’t take Jayhole’s perverse sense of humor. Some stories are too slight and a bit dull, but the others are sharp, shiny, and dangerous.
Dark, grim, and sardonically funny, Jodzio’s stories stick like gum to the side of your brain and won’t shake loose.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59376-635-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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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