A most exasperating lug, this Parker. The naïf has his innocent charms, but his endless stumbles, losses, and misdirections...
A young man tries to separate the bruises from the clues in his coming-of-ager—sort of—in an understated, fitfully endearing debut.
In ten self-sustaining chapters from age 14 to mid-30s, the eternally naive Parker moves from right-field daydreams to a Spanish honeymoon without ever quite knowing what he’s supposed to do. On the baseball field in junior high, the one fly-ball that comes his way just seems to find its way into his glove: Parker takes that as a sign that he was ready for it. His big brother takes him to the gym for his first crack at weight training, after previously treating him to a dip of snuff, but he isn’t ready for either of them. Girls enter the equation when he attends a weeklong Methodist camp and gets a crush on Nicole Liarkos; but he returns home to lose his best (and only) friend. With the help of a couple of new faces in his class, one male, one female, he begins a transition to high-school punk, but that phase doesn’t last beyond a scene at the prom. College is viewed only after it’s already over for Parker: trying to recover from a breakup with a woman who’s still enrolled, he jogs endlessly past her apartment and, for money, waits tables. A move to Miami puts him next door to two strippers—and provides a failed opportunity with the gorgeous one of them. Another move, to Atlanta, puts him into the company of two other women: crazy Trina, whom he finally advises to check into an institution; and Pamela, who inflames him wildly—and is engaged to his best friend. Parker finally meets his match, Rachael, in graduate school—but not before he drops out.
A most exasperating lug, this Parker. The naïf has his innocent charms, but his endless stumbles, losses, and misdirections do wear thin.Pub Date: March 21, 2002
ISBN: 1-56512-344-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
