Seven stories (six previously unpublished) reveal a wide range of gay lives in America, from those of southern small-town outcasts to those of San Francisco sophisticates. But despite the range, this latest collection from the author of Identity and Difference (1990), etc., proves only fitfully satisfying. The sorrows of loners and the redemptive power of music are threaded through Weltner's tales. In the title piece, a young man living an unremarkable life in a newly prosperous southern town is drawn out of his meager existence by music. Need for a car brings him into contact with another loner, a gifted mechanic with a passion for Mahler whose garage is about to be bulldozed to make way for a mall, and both the music and the man bring him closer to understanding himself. In ``Buddy Loves Jo Ann,'' another outsider, a dejected old man, is asked by his only friend, whom he's known since childhood, to help her end her suffering. He loses his nerve and flees to a rundown seaside resort, where he's saved from drowning himself by a gruff, tattooed cook who gives him shelter, the money to return home, and a meaningful kiss goodbye. City scenes range from the bars in New Orleans in ``Unlike Himself,'' where a hustling hunk tangles with a repressed professor of literature, each giving the other something terrible yet liberating, to the apartments of gay San Francisco, where the sudden death of a record store owner in ``The Greek Head'' sends the owner's longtime companion into a funk—a funk compounded by the deceased having willed his most prized possession to a downstairs neighbor. So motley a crew of characters, with all too human failings, are both a strength and a weakness here: The frankness they're presented with often seems at odds with a lingering sense of contrivance in their relationships.
Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-55597-253-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
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
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