Not always in balance, but engaging, sympathetic, and capably done.
A first collection from screenwriter-singer Moynihan, daughter of the late New York senator, chronicles the cultural clashes between India and its Western aficionados.
In “A Good Job in Delhi,” house servant Hari is pulled between traditional customs and the lure of his English “master’s” World Bank–supported lifestyle. With luck, Bob Thompson will take Hari back to the West, presumably every Indian worker’s dream. Hari busily sidetracks his mother, who has recently chosen his bride, with lies that will keep him among Bob’s extravagant parties and beautiful lovers. Although the story is politically aware and rich in description, it fizzles with an ending rushed to an ineffective, teary departure. “High Commissioner for Refugees” focuses on two American friends who catch the Dalai Lama speaking in Gangtok. Leyton works for the UN, Davis for a congressman, and both are fully versed in the Chinese invasion of Tibet. After helping a Tibetan monk who’d been tortured, Leyton is asked to contact his government in hopes that five arrested monks might be freed. Though brief, the tale successfully explores the fine line between idealism and reality. “The Visa” charts the higher echelons of Indian society, where travels to Disneyland provide powerful social clout as visas remain hard to secure: Melanie Andrews, a naïve embassy official, discovers to what ruthless extent people will go to acquire them in this dead-on dark comedy. In “Paying Guest,” a nicely written story that doesn’t know where to end, an American Hindustani vocalist is housed by one of two artistically feuding families, eventually taking advantage of everyone who wishes to take advantage of her. In the novella “Masterji,” Moynihan’s most penetrating look at East/West collisions, people chosen from all over the world attend the Masterji’s teachings at the Himalaya Guest House. Awaiting instruction from the dying spiritualist, the followers spend their time arguing civil liberties, enlightenment, and clothing. Finally, “In the Heart of Braj” follows a young woman who, searching for isolation and meaning, discovers that being infatuated with a culture is different from understanding it.
Not always in balance, but engaging, sympathetic, and capably done.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-055932-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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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