Cleverness is the hook with this little fable—those delighting in wordplay will be duly rewarded by seeing language...
A mostly lighthearted tweaking of literary sensibilities, playwright Dunn’s first novel gets good mileage from a simple notion: People can carry hero worship way too far.
The hero in question is Nevin Nollop, “inventor” of the well-known pangram “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” The tiny island of Nollop, off the South Carolina coast, is an independent nation devoted to the preservation of his memory and achievement—devoted, that is, until the letters start falling from the sentence on the man’s monument, one by one. A series of notes and letters from citizens of this highly literate nation, particularly Ella and Tassie, two young cousins who are members of the Minnow Pea family, records the actions of the island’s ruling council, which decides that the fallen letters (and the words that contain them) are meant to be removed from Nollop’s vocabulary. “Z” goes first, followed by “Q” and a quick succession of others; each of the fallen is treated as were its predecessors, with a “three strikes and you’re out” penalty imposed on any Nollopians who fail to make the required adjustments. This creates severe hardship for the islanders, who begin to leave voluntarily or by penalty; life comes to a virtual standstill for those who remain. A young journalist from the mainland arrives in secret to appeal to the reason of the sole council member who still seems to have any, and before he’s unmasked and deported he both plants a seed of hope and steals Tassie’s heart. But it’s on the shoulders of Ella, brave Ella, that the burden of rescuing the island from its madness ultimately falls.
Cleverness is the hook with this little fable—those delighting in wordplay will be duly rewarded by seeing language stretched to its limits.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-9673701-6-7
Page Count: 220
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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