Well-observed, sometimes funny, if seemingly pointless.
Londoners get down and dirty in a debut collection of interlinked stories where everybody is either having an affair or just behaving badly.
Newcomer Liddle, formerly a Guardian columnist, now an editor at The Spectator, offers something that more authors in these busy, busily plotted times should think of including: a chart mapping out all his major (and minor) characters and their relationships to one another (solid line means they had sex, dotted means they’re just acquaintances). The problem is, though, that this sharp but underwhelming volume of short pieces doesn’t come close to meriting such a tool, which comes off as just a touch pretentious for a book that’s essentially a series of black comic vignettes about screwing around and screwing up. These are good stories in general, most of them definitely able to stand on their own. Liddle knows quite well the spoiled, bored young things who populate his pages. In “Thirty Seconds with Sophie,” he presents a complete portrait of a certain kind of self-consciously slumming rich kid blindly sampling every drug put before him and sleeping with anyone and everyone, all as a sort of constant one-person performance piece of self-obsession. Some later tales verge into a darker fantasy realm. A woman starts growing a foul covering on her skin after using a hair depilatory; not as well thought-out as it could have been, the tale ends up as a ridiculous escapade involving more hilariously disaffected Londoners and a secret US military research facility. “What the Thunder Said” is a malicious piece of clockwork nastiness in which Christian, a serial philanderer who almost enjoys the elaborate deceits around his liaisons as much (or more than) the sex itself, is coming home from an assignation when a horrific train crash leaves him with something quite impossible to just explain away. But, by the end, this is all much the same sort of thing, cycling through repetitive similar themes, not worth more than a brief glance.
Well-observed, sometimes funny, if seemingly pointless.Pub Date: Dec. 28, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-51308-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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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