Very flat, though: The author concentrates so thoroughly on the interior world of her two protagonists that it’s difficult...
Elegant if a bit lugubrious story of the odd reunion of a Vietnam vet with his Amerasian daughter.
One of the more enduring legacies of the war in Vietnam are the con lai—half-breed children of American GIs and Vietnamese women. Fifteen-year-old Mai is one of these. Her father, Aaron, was a US Army surgeon who did several tours of duty in Southeast Asia in the early ’60s, while her mother, Linh, was the daughter of a rich and prominent Vietnamese family. Life for the con lai was difficult in the best of times, but it becomes especially hard with the fall of Saigon and the advent of a communist regime that is both anti-bourgeois and anti-American. After enduring a succession of refugee camps and “reeducation” centers, Linh and Mai emigrate to Paris, where they are taken in by relatives. Mai adjusts well to Paris at first, but after Linh sinks into depression and eventually disappears, Mai becomes an insomniac. Meanwhile, Aaron, who’s been living unhappily in Los Angeles with Evelyn and their daughter Lucy, begins searching for Linh and Mai and locates them in Paris. Now a distinguished specialist in sleep disorders, Aaron brings Mai to LA for treatment and introduces her to his family. Evelyn is understandably upset and wants nothing to do with Mai, and Lucy finds the situation difficult to acknowledge as well. Told alternately from the perspectives of Lucy and Mai, Second-novelist Krygier (First the Raven, not reviewed) portrays the tentative steps by which two young women discover and come to terms with their identities and adjust their perceptions of the world and themselves.
Very flat, though: The author concentrates so thoroughly on the interior world of her two protagonists that it’s difficult to see them as real characters moving through real situations.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2004
ISBN: 1-59264-086-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Toby Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
Humane and humorous. Rushdie is in top form, serving up a fine piece of literary satire.
A modern Don Quixote lands in Trumpian America and finds plenty of windmills to tilt at.
Mix Rushdie’s last novel, The Golden House (2017), with his 1990 fable, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and you get something approaching this delightful confection. An aging salesman loses his job as a pharmaceutical rep, fired, with regret, by his cousin and employer. The old man, who bears the name Ismail Smile, Smile itself being an Americanization of Ismail, is “a brown man in America longing for a brown woman.” He is a dreamer—and not without ambition. Borrowing from both opera and dim memories of Cervantes, he decides to call himself Quichotte, though fake news, the din of television, and “the Age of Anything-Can-Happen” and not dusty medieval romances have made him a little dotty. His Dulcinea, Salma R, exists on the other side of the TV screen, so off Quichotte quests in a well-worn Chevy, having acquired as if by magic a patient son named Sancho, who observes that Dad does everything just like it’s done on the tube and in stories: “So if the old Cruze is our Pequod then I guess Miss Salma R is the big fish and he, ‘Daddy,’ is my Ahab." By this point, Rushdie has complicated the yarn by attributing it to a hack writer, another Indian immigrant, named Sam DuChamp (read Sam the Sham), who has mixed into the Quixote story lashings of Moby-Dick, Ismail for Ishmael, and the Pinocchio of both Collodi and Disney (“You can call me Jiminy if you want,” says an Italian-speaking cricket to Sancho along the way), to say nothing of the America of Fentanyl, hypercapitalism, and pop culture and the yearning for fame. It’s a splendid mess that, in the end, becomes a meditation on storytelling, memory, truth, and other hallmarks of a disappearing civilization: “What vanishes when everything vanishes," Rushdie writes, achingly, “not only everything, but the memory of everything.”
Humane and humorous. Rushdie is in top form, serving up a fine piece of literary satire.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13298-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A near-anthropological study of male insecurity.
Wayne’s latest foray into the dark minds of lonely young men follows the rise and fall of a friendship between two aspiring fiction writers on opposite sides of a vast cultural divide.
In 1996, our unnamed protagonist is living a cushy New York City life: He's a first-year student in Columbia’s MFA program in fiction (the exorbitant bill footed by his father) who’s illegally subletting his great-aunt’s rent-controlled East Village apartment (for which his father also foots the bill). And it is in this state—acutely aware of his unearned advantages, questioning his literary potential, and deeply alone—that he meets Billy. Billy is an anomaly in the program: a community college grad from small-town Illinois, staggeringly talented, and very broke. But shared unease is as strong a foundation for friendship as any, and soon, our protagonist invites Billy to take over his spare room, a mutually beneficial if precarious arrangement. They are the very clear products of two different Americas, one the paragon of working-class hardscrabble masculinity, the other an exemplar of the emasculating properties of parental wealth—mirror images, each in possession of what the other lacks. “He would always have to struggle to stay financially afloat,” our protagonist realizes, “and I would always be fine, all because my father was a professional and his was a layabout. I had an abundance of resources; here was a concrete means for me to share it.” And he means it, when he thinks it, and for a while, the affection between them is enough to (mostly) paper over the awkward imbalance of the setup. Wayne (Loner, 2016) captures the nuances of this dynamic—a musky cocktail of intimacy and rage and unspoken mutual resentment—with draftsmanlike precision, and when the breaking point comes, as, of course, it does, it leaves one feeling vaguely ill, in the best way possible.
A near-anthropological study of male insecurity.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63557-400-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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