Thirteen stories (four published previously), about strange goings-on from the depths of the jungle to the house next door, serve as a hip but not particularly hypnotic debut collection. The title story transports an entire wedding party of New Age gringos to a remote Central American jungle for a shaman-officiated ceremony, accompanied by an ultra-cool video artist hired for the occasion. His vision of the trip—replete with images of a teeming slum, the group’s armored-car escort, and the shaman making a deal with rebels as the party kicks into gear—is clouded by the same hallucinogenic drink the others have imbibed: when he awakens, the party’s over and his tapes are gone, but he still has the last laugh. Altered states have a different effect in “K2,” as a set designer labors long to build a credible mountain on stage, but when the singer of a washed-out punk band brought in for the final all-night push dies from an overdose, the designer gains a new perspective on his work. In “Mammals,” another band is tuning up for a gig on Nantucket, but a spat between one of the members and his wife over (what else?) drugs sends her to the beach, where she finds a dying dolphin in the dark and tries to save it. —Public Burning,— a variation on the Truman movie theme, features a sociology grad student who mounts 24-hour surveillance on a family renting the house next door. His own all-American family has a few kinks, however, as Mom masturbates upstairs while Dad’s in the basement with his arsenal, getting ready for the day the feds come after him for not paying his taxes. Needless to say, when he finds a camera in the wall, all hell breaks loose. Some tantalizing moments here, but most of these tales come up short in conveying character. It’s not encouraging when a dead dolphin has more depth than the people around it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-393-04526-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
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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