Far from perfect but never dull, and the author impresses as always with her willingness to take risks.
A second collection from Homes (after The Safety of Objects, 1990, coming soon to a theater near you) is focused as usual on suburban angst and extreme behavior.
This author’s particular gifts are generally better displayed in novels, where her penchant for shock effects is tempered by a covert compassion that’s usually only evident in the longer run. We glimpse it here in the more controlled stories: “The Chinese Lesson” is rich in geographic and social detail as it limns a shaky marriage between a couple uneasily transplanted to Larchmont from Manhattan (further frazzled by the presence—and worrying absences—of the wife’s “slowly evaporating” mother). The same glimpse can be gotten in “The Former First Lady and the Football Star,” a bleak but oddly tender imagining of what Nancy Reagan’s life is like now with Alzheimer’s-afflicted Ronnie. “Rockets Round the Moon” is initially even better: the 12-year-old narrator, shunted aside by his self-absorbed divorced parents, has taught himself “to be a person whom people like to have around.” He clings to the seeming normalcy of his father’s next-door neighbors until an out-of-the-blue accident dislocates them too and leads to a gory climax that Homes blows off in her most annoying manner. There are other irritants. Why muffle the impact of the “Do Not Disturb,” a harrowing portrait of an enraged cancer victim, with unexplained but insistent links to a weaker story (“Please Remain Calm”)? Why does a writer whose strength lies in depicting the weirdness of ordinary lives bother with the bad pseudo-folkloric magic of “Raft in Water, Floating” and “The Weather Outside Is Sunny and Bright”? “Georgica” (a woman masturbates while she watches couples make love on the beach, then collects the used condoms to inseminate herself) and “The Whiz Kids” (graphic gay sex, deliberately unpleasant to no apparent purpose) show Homes in her gross-out-the-squares mode. The title piece is intriguing but underdeveloped.
Far from perfect but never dull, and the author impresses as always with her willingness to take risks.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-688-16712-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
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
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers...
Exploring humankind's place in the universe and the nature of humanity, many of the stories in this stellar collection focus on how technological advances can impact humanity’s evolutionary journey.
Chiang's (Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002) second collection begins with an instant classic, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” which won Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novelette in 2008. A time-travel fantasy set largely in ancient Baghdad, the story follows fabric merchant Fuwaad ibn Abbas after he meets an alchemist who has crafted what is essentially a time portal. After hearing life-changing stories about others who have used the portal, he decides to go back in time to try to right a terrible wrong—and realizes, too late, that nothing can erase the past. Other standout selections include “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” a story about a software tester who, over the course of a decade, struggles to keep a sentient digital entity alive; “The Great Silence,” which brilliantly questions the theory that humankind is the only intelligent race in the universe; and “Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny,” which chronicles the consequences of machines raising human children. But arguably the most profound story is "Exhalation" (which won the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Short Story), a heart-rending message and warning from a scientist of a highly advanced, but now extinct, race of mechanical beings from another universe. Although the being theorizes that all life will die when the universes reach “equilibrium,” its parting advice will resonate with everyone: “Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.”
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers in a big way.Pub Date: May 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-94788-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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