If it’s true that amateurs borrow and professionals steal, when McManus begins a truly larcenous assault on those he...
Now and then comes a first book by a writer so young and possessed of unique voice and vision, his promise seems unlimited—that, despite its evident poise and skill, is unfortunately not the case with this highly derivative debut collection.
Of the 15 stories here, only two or three have any staying power. “Sleep on Stones,” about a man who plants 83 seedlings of the indestructible weed kudzu around the house of the woman who jilted him, has the potential to rise into fascinating metaphor, with kudzu serving as analogue for obsessive, possessive love. Or the potential to rise into high hilarity. It does neither. The 22-year-old McManus appears too obsessed with control to let his prose fly. And if these uniformly bleak stories are any indication, he has little inclination toward humor. The collection traces the periphery of the social order: a man hires himself out to be chained on the first floor of a house in the Salt Flats of Utah over a methamphetamine lab he never sees (“Desert”); a drug dealer comes to realize that Bruce, who seems to share his survivalist, white supremacist views, is actually a narc (“What I Remember about the Cold War”); a college student with something approximating agoraphobia spends his student loans to leave school and camp out alone on an abandoned copper strip-mine (“Gegenschein”). McManus’s treatment of these dramas is as ineffectual as the lives of those he chronicles; few of the stories cohere with any sort of frisson of insight for either character or reader. “The Feed Zone,” about a bicyclist’s obsession with winning and revenge, takes place during a grueling race, yet despite the author’s almost encyclopedic knowledge of bike racing, only the briefest of moments ever convey the rider’s passion or exhaustion. Much here reads as if McManus cannot quite decide whether he wants to be Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, George Saunders, William Faulkner—or whoever he’s mimicking at any given moment.
If it’s true that amateurs borrow and professionals steal, when McManus begins a truly larcenous assault on those he admires, he’s in for a promising career.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26278-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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