A highly suppressed first effort that can’t move beyond its hard-to-swallow premise.
A psychologically circuitous debut tracks a confidence man’s malevolently seductive influence on a bland and uptight Ohio family.
Shoe (Susan) Tumarkin, 34, has been senselessly murdered, execution style, in the Colorado woods, leaving her five-year-old son Moses in the care of Shoe’s maidenish painter sister Ida. Ida adores Moses but has never seen much of the world, having shunned its luxurious pleasures in favor of living at her childhood Ohio home with her emotionally distant mother, a convalescent, and retiring professor father. Ida will wait for her true love to find her, whatever form he takes, and he does, though he happens to be Moses’s wayward father, Max Frost, an art dealer and monstrous egomaniac, whom the reader meets as Shoe’s last lover in a titillating backstory. Before her murder, Shoe, in fact, fled Max because of his distaste for her feet—a metaphor for his desire to change all women into his demented ideal. Similarly, once Max enchants the guileless and over-30 virgin Ida, he unveils extravagant plans to remake her, too—to the horror of Ida and of Shoe’s brother Johnny, who seems the only character here with a grip on reality. Once the reader accepts the effortless—and preposterous—introduction of beguiling Max into the Tumarkin household (Mrs. Tumarkin will even attend the physician he recommends and dutifully take his pills), the premonitions of Ida’s trip down the road to ruin read like exquisite torture—when, for example, as part of Max’s cruel deflowering of his fiancée, he prescribes porn movies for her to study. Mockler lets her story unfold with an undernourished relish, thanks to the naively determined protagonist Ida, who could be at home in an E.M. Forster novel. Still, the writing can drift wanly, draining substance from things. The reader hopes for edges and blood but finds only weak characters and pale prose.
A highly suppressed first effort that can’t move beyond its hard-to-swallow premise.Pub Date: June 19, 2003
ISBN: 1-931561-37-0
Page Count: 392
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
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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