A disappointment, especially for a debut writer with such publishing credentials.
A first collection from a young author whose work has appeared in Harper’s and the New Yorker, where he was featured as a 2001 Debut Fiction Writer.
Nesbitt’s ten stories have appealingly cryptic titles such as “Chimp Shrink & Backwards” and “Man in Towel with Gun,” and each presents a wry, sometimes helpless, always young black male narrator. Often these protagonists find themselves in boring but amusing occupations: cleaning up a deer carcass in “Quality Fuel for Electric Living”; running a volatile nightclub in “Thursday the 16th”; or working at a second-tier zoo in the title story. Sometimes—as in “The Ones Who May Kill You in the Morning,” about “The Help” at an obnoxious rich man’s party—these situations lead to danger or confrontation, but most of the pieces feel unresolved. From their “weird” environments, Nesbitt’s narrators deliver ironic jabs at the world: one has a girlfriend who “kisses like a mule biting a carrot,” while another opens his tale by saying, “My dad lost his left leg, so he has to drive an automatic.” Such comic lines are sometimes right-on; more often than not, though, they fall flat—a flatness compounded by the fact that all ten narrators sound identical. They usually drink too much, but they seem to do this not out of need but because their author couldn’t contrive anything else for them to do. Still, the monotony of character is not the problem here: the real difficulty is that in the absence of well-drawn characters, your attention naturally shifts to the plot; and in the absence of anything coherent or dramatic happening in these stories, your attention shifts to the style. Nesbitt’s style, though often bold and winning, can’t carry the whole load, and so the most engaging aspect of this collection is its titles.
A disappointment, especially for a debut writer with such publishing credentials.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8021-1709-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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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