Amusing but short of hilarity: too few pages, though immensely detailed, build and release.
“I’m angry at you because you don’t know why I’m angry at you, she said. I’m not really angry, I’m disappointed . . . Invisible flames emanated from her on all sides.”
Few American writers have captured the ambiguities of modern woman as richly as Baumbach (Seven Wives, 1998, etc.), who here attempts a fictional memoir about his sexual ties—in his most distilled version of the babble of the sexes. All women in B’s tale share the same impossible, totally unstable, but absolutely assured character. Is theirs a response to B’s fear of intimacy? B is a writer whose first wife (a child bride) left him after nine months. After seven years, he and wife 2 (who had “small tolerance for imperfection”) had thoroughly trashed all intimacy. “Wife 3, before we were married, at least, tended to see me in the most generous light, which gave me a renewed sense of pleasure in myself . . . I was in love with Wife 3, who aside from being a little crazy, seemed almost perfect to me. . . You see, I had to go through the disappointment and grief of two marriages that didn’t count to get to the one I was meant to have.” But after 16 years, she dumps him for someone else. He can understand that in the abstract (“Hadn’t I left Wife 2 because I also preferred someone else?”). Poetic justice, fair enough. But he’s heartbroken for two years and attends Heartbreak Anonymous meetings, leading him into more affairs. When he speaks of all this during a talk at the Femmes Club, in the book’s funniest scene, he’s pelted with invective, fruit, and vegetables. When women spend hours chewing B to rags, dismissing him utterly, then press their bodies to his to get him to stay overnight, is he an imbecile to stay?
Amusing but short of hilarity: too few pages, though immensely detailed, build and release.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-9723363-0-3
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Low Fidelity Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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