This is a fierce, untamed, riotous book—and from the first page you’ll know you’re not reading Jane Austen.
If Kerouac were writing today, his work might look something like this—and despite the title, many of the stories are indeed ours, as they focus on love and loss, pain and yearning.
The “stories” are not discrete fictional units as much as variations on different themes that recur as we move through the narrative. One theme is the narrator’s love of Catherine, who’s moved on both literally and figuratively, for she went to Paris and fell in love with a Spaniard, Manuelo. The narrator’s love for her is both intense and desperate, and he’s never quite gotten over her loss. Another leitmotif is the death of the narrator’s older brother, Carl, an event clearly even more traumatic than the loss of Catherine. The narrator’s agony over this death pervades many of the stories but especially “Before Carl Left.” The central character in the novel, however, is the narrator himself. Having been jailed and gone to rehab, and having had bizarre episodes following his participation in a peyote ritual, the narrator seems lucky to be alive. Even his turn at wearing a shirt and tie and teaching freshman composition at a small college in eastern Texas doesn’t domesticate him, as he lives close to the bone on a ranch he rents from Squeaky, a gay rodeo roper. In a final bit of ironic exuberance, the narrator urges us to “Find God. Find love, Find America” rather than read a book—especially the one we’re holding in our hands.
This is a fierce, untamed, riotous book—and from the first page you’ll know you’re not reading Jane Austen.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-57366-180-5
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Univ. of Alabama
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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