The juvenilia of a vision still in search of itself.
The 2002 John Simmons Short Fiction Award winner has far more misses than hits among seven tales that for the most part seem inspired by TV rather than life.
The title story is simple teenage angst: Does that “feeling down between my legs” mean our knife-carrying, still-a-virgin, half-convincing bad girl narrator is really a lesbian? In “She’s Anonymous,” a woman in a shallow and tawdry relationship heads inevitably toward a shallow and tawdry epiphany, while “That Easy Kind of Life” is a soaper about the aborted child of an uninspiring couple (“ . . . pretending not to notice that the light sheen of sweat on Max’s chest was accentuating the cuts and ripples of his well-worked-out upper body”) that has more in common with After-School Specials than with literature. Similarly, “Hugo, Arthur and Bobby Joe” is the disappointing but aptly named set of random pettinesses surrounding an all-too-Ally McBeal–like narrator’s three boyfriends, and the final story, a long-winded father-son trip, is little more than an opportunity to demonstrate authorial proficiency at stereotypical male machismo. Too often, Valeri depicts characters who lack sophistication with vision that is itself lacking in sophistication. The one exception is the striking “Whatever he Did, he Did Enough,” about a man’s attempt to rescue a young Cuban dancer. The piece becomes an examination of love from its fairy-tale beginnings, on through delusion, and then to the unhappily ever after. As a treatise on jealousy and the death of romance, it is profound and sets the author alongside the likes of Mary Gaitskill. But most of the time the literary here is only a sheen—the stories often fail to achieve the little they aspire to—and as to the award: Who would want to enter only to lose to so clearly a fledgling effort?
The juvenilia of a vision still in search of itself.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-87745-819-7
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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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