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SUN CITY

Red-hot at the start, but the story-within-a-story has a different pace and mood, and ultimately takes the upper hand—a...

Smart though uneven noirish confection from poet, nonfiction author, and novelist Di Prisco (Confessions of Brother Eli, not reviewed): a tale of two gamblers, one an ace at blackjack and too sharp for his own good, the other a loser who gets lucky—but both unlucky in love.

Dolly is a man with a dilemma: He owes a bunch of money to his bookie that he can’t repay, and has his face smashed as a way of reminding him that he must. On his way into hiding, Dolly stumbles across a manuscript given him years ago by Valentino Comfort, the most brilliant member of a team assembled to beat casino banks at blackjack. Dolly, who, as a member of the same team, suggested Val write the story, holes up with his part-time pit bull Ranger in his almost ex-wife’s house to read it, believing that he can sell Val’s work as his own, making a movie deal and a million in the bargain. But the story proves to be other than he remembers. For one thing, Dolly barely exists in it, except as the butt of everyone’s jokes. For another, Val writes too much about the action away from the blackjack tables, such as mysterious encounters with his father, the episode of another bookie’s mysterious murder (which Dolly knows more about than he cares to admit), and, above all, Val’s growing entanglement with The Teaser, the beautiful, mysterious creator of the device the team will use to beat the casinos. In fact, Val’s account turns into a love story, even after he finally turns to the team’s greatest caper: a successful assault on the Sun City casino in South Africa. But something in the way Val tells it finally lets Dolly know he’s holding a winner.

Red-hot at the start, but the story-within-a-story has a different pace and mood, and ultimately takes the upper hand—a change not entirely welcome.

Pub Date: June 30, 2002

ISBN: 1-931561-08-7

Page Count: 258

Publisher: MacAdam/Cage

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002

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THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

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

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SIGHTSEEING

STORIES

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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