An appealingly fallible hero who deserves the sequel an epilogue promises.
The pseudonymous Amanda Cross’s son, a New York public defender, tosses his hat into the ring with a legal thriller about—what else?—a New York public defender.
Generally speaking, admits Arch Gold, “I really don’t care whether my clients are guilty or innocent”; he doesn’t pick them any more than they pick him. But if he did pick, he’d certainly avoid Damon Tucker, the hulking black college kid accused of mugging and killing Charlotte King, whose career with high-profile p.i. firm Yates Associates was cut short when she went art-shopping around the corner from the Chelsea video store where Damon worked. The cops have Damon’s prints on a videotape in Charlotte’s purse and her prints on three $10 bills in his pocket; the defense has Damon’s furious insistence that Charlotte’s deathbed ID didn’t ID him. Except for a deft, unexpected development that suddenly puts the death penalty on the table, the case unfolds pretty much as you’d expect in court and out, with Arch convinced, but unable to prove, that Charlotte was killed by the untouchable boss she was touching in all the right places. In fact, Arch’s fixation on scary James L. Yates would make him an obvious candidate for Charlotte’s psychiatrist if Dr. Stern hadn’t checked out soon after his client courtesy of another suspicious mugging. What’s best here is Arch himself, proud of his courtroom technique but candid about the limitations that cause the defense, which initially looks promising, to blow up in his face. And although Arch’s cowboy techniques outside the courtroom—breaking and entering, carrying a concealed firearm, the whole nine yards—are both less legal and less believable, he at least has the grace not to pretend he does stuff like this all the time and it’s perfectly all right.
An appealingly fallible hero who deserves the sequel an epilogue promises.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-053812-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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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