Well-polished, smartly relevant fiction.
Traditional southern Indian society clashes with fast-changing Western ways, in a debut collection of eight elegant, nicely developed stories.
Sankaran has her finger on the economic pulse that motivates many of these striving young characters, all from the provincial city of Bangalore, to embrace modern technological changes at the peril of rupturing family and culture. In “Bombay This,” the fine opener, a 30ish “software lad” tentatively invites his mother to begin matchmaking for him; as a member of the ruling class buttressing its traditional privileges with new technocratic trimmings, Ramu is heeding “the true Call of the Patriarchy.” He and his mother separately land on the same prospect, Bombay-bred snob Ashwini, whose ultramodern ways prove both attractive and ruinous. In “Alphabet Soup,” a young Indian woman who has grown up in America and attended elitist East Coast schools decides it’s time to fulfill “multicultural obligations” and head back to India, where she can proudly be “Brown in a Brown country.” She defies her father, who made the choice to come to America in the first place, but while she is in Bangalore she recognizes the “maddening” complexities that enter into the choice to leave or stay. “The Red Carpet” takes readers into two starkly different castes. Poor, uneducated Rangappa has to support his parents, sister, wife and baby daughter on a pittance of a salary as a driver, while his glamorous employer lives in idle richness. Scandalously modern in dress and habits, the attractive Mrs. Choudhary is liberal and kind toward Rangappa and his family, though she renames him Raju on some inexplicable whim. “Apple Pie, One by Two” revisits the chummy software lads, who have attended the best engineering schools in America and are eagerly sought after for jobs. Each one plays out his childhood fantasies of success made in America: “the nabob in the storybook, another foolish Indian abroad.”
Well-polished, smartly relevant fiction.Pub Date: April 6, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-33817-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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
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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