A wispy second collection (after Bodies of Water, 1990) of 11 often inchoate stories from the Jamaican-born author of, among others, Free Enterprise (1993). Mostly told in present tense and dominated by brief sentence fragments, these are expressions of cultural and ethnic dislocation and conflict whose protagonists are, generally, Caribbeans either possessed by visions of American wealth and security (as in the title piece) or struggling to understand the imperfect fulfillment of their fantasies once they’ve emigrated. Cliff’s prose is assured and rhythmic, but there’s virtually no dramatic tension in the majority of these sketches (several really can’t be called stories). Some verge on sociological reportage (“Apache Tears”); a few seem autobiographical (“Stan’s Speed Shop,” “Wartime,” and especially a tale of former lovers’ reunited: “Art History”). But the most frustrating inclusion is “A Public Woman,” which, though fascinating in its elliptical account of a courtesan’s murder a century ago, is clearly only a prÇcis—Cliff’s notes, if you will—of a story she hasn’t written yet. Vivid descriptions help, as do recurring elements—such as the use of American movies as examples of possessions and states of being to which her frequently indigent characters aspire (“Some of our best times are spent in the dark, thrilled by the certainty that in the dark anything can happen”). Accordingly, Cliff succeeds best with the nicely developed “Monster,” about an ardent newlywed determined to bond with his Jamaican bride’s family by stubbornly completing a screening of the classic horror film Frankenstein—even after the theater catches fire. Better yet is the volume’s opening story, “Transactions,” which traces the grimly comic consequences of an American traveler’s purchase of a defiant young girl from her impoverished family. Apart from these two, the momentum is essentially downhill in a disappointing patchwork publication from a writer who’s capable of much better work than this.
Pub Date: May 15, 1998
ISBN: 0-395-90129-4
Page Count: 128
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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