A good conceit with passable execution.
Saferstein’s debut collection of short stories, letters and journal entries chronicles the story of the historic Hollywood Beach Hotel in Hollywood, Fla.
The hotel (now the Hollywood Beach Resort) has a storied past; in its 87-year history, it has undergone numerous transformations—from a glamorous beach retreat for the wealthy to a World War II–naval-training center for American soldiers to a Bible college for evangelical Christians. Saferstein attempts to trace the history of the hotel through a series of fictional letters, journal entries and short stories, each from the perspective of an occupant of room 732 during a specific incarnation of the hotel’s past. Saferstein’s unrelated narrators range widely—a discontented 1960s housewife, a senior naval-training officer in World War II, a women’s rights advocate of the 1970s, among others—and share a theme of motherhood. (Saferstein mentions in her author’s notes that she was inspired to focus on this theme in each story due to the death of her mother.) It’s clear that she did her research before writing; each chapter abounds with accurate historical details indicating the period in which it is set, e.g., during the 1940s, “First restaurant we went to had two big signs over its two doors. One said WHITES ONLY, and the other said COLORED ONLY.” Some sections sabotage the dramatic tension, however, by including abundantly obvious information. And while Saferstein’s concept is clever, the individual stories (perhaps due to their diarylike nature) lack plotting and do more telling than showing.
A good conceit with passable execution.Pub Date: Dec. 21, 2012
ISBN: 978-1479268887
Page Count: 350
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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