A manically careening debut collection from Davies, the lead singer and songwriter for the 1960s band The Kinks and author of his 'unauthorized' autobiography, X-Ray (1995). Davies devotes the first half of the volume to his apparent doppelgÑnger, the former British pop/rock icon and current has- been Les Mulligan, and Mulligan’s nebbish of an agent, Richard Tennent. Impoverished and always near mental breakdown, Mulligan resists attempts by Tennent and others to revive his career and instead 'confront[s] the demons' by panhandling in public parks and undertaking other misadventures that presume to paint the tortured soul of an insecure true artist. With a confused structure and lines like 'He turned to another lyric. Or was it a new chapter in his life?,' this first section seems a mixed-up, unfinished mess. What follows, however, appears to have unaccountably sprung from the mind of a seasoned and mature author, not the aging hipster who wrote the aforementioned. This series of vaguely connected pieces includes the charming “Mr. Pleasant,” in which a dandy accountant at the end of his career briefly considers a dalliance with a dominatrix for hire, discovers his inability to empathize, and, as do many characters here, reconciles himself with the Faustian bargains he’s made. Muriel, a silent vagrant who passed briefly through the narrative of Les Mulligan, is awarded a magical account of her own, 'Voices in the Dark,' in which she serves as the mute therapist who hears everyone and judges no one. In 'Return to Waterloo,' the final'and finest'entry, Davies writes a gem of a character study. Frightening and funny, it portrays the quiet, seething rage and misogyny of a serial rapist who just wants some respect. When Davies abandons the embarrassing navel-gazing of a musician gone stale, he creates storytelling as surprising and unique as the song lyrics he wrote decades ago.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7868-6535-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
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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