Smith’s frequent focus on the bizarre clouds his vision.
Debut collection of nine limp stories, some realistic, others whimsical.
The opening story, “Isolettes,” illustrates that limpness. An, a translator, has “given up on relationships.” Still, she tells her gay friend Jacob, she’d like a baby because she feels “a bit adrift.” She arranges an artificial insemination with Jacob; the baby is a preemie; it dies in the incubator. Ironically, Jacob is more distraught than An, who stays detached, as does the reader. In the last and longest story, “Jaybird,” Benoit is a struggling, fairly talented stage actor. He’s also vain, competitive, promiscuous and dull. His apprentice in a theater mentoring program is Madeleine, a smart, resourceful scheduler at a talent agency whose famous clients treat her like a piece of furniture. Madeleine uses Benoit to get her revenge. This should have been her story, but Benoit is the lead, which makes for an uninvolving denouement. Smith also misfires with “Scrapbook,” the obliquely told story of a campus massacre that focuses on the relationship between Thomas, a survivor, and his girlfriend Amy. Thomas’s cowardly behavior is never examined deeply enough. Smith is more on target with “Green Fluorescent Protein,” in which 17-year-old Max fights his attraction to another male teenager. Max’s mother, a recovering alcoholic, gets her own story, (“Funny Weird or Funny Ha Ha?), a meandering lament for her dead husband. The best and worst stories are purely fanciful. In the title story, eight-year-old Eepie Carpetrod finds her age and brainpower accelerating dramatically, courtesy of a rare syndrome. She becomes famous, with her own cable talk show; then in old age, the process goes into reverse; the story is short, and it sizzles. “Extremities” is about some calfskin gloves in love with a store detective, and a dead astronaut’s right foot that makes landfall in a rosebush. Yes, it’s as silly as it sounds.
Smith’s frequent focus on the bizarre clouds his vision.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-38610-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
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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