An energetic if uneven debut collection focusing mostly on the lives of Hispanics in modern California. As a keynot, each of Mendoza's stories uses a card from the Mexican game of Loteria and a line from the poem accompanying that that image. The conceit is sometimes very effective. The keynote of ``El Mundo'' is a man struggling to bear the weight of the globe. The story's wealthy, self-satisfied protagonist, by contrast, has a short, unpleasant encounter with two derelicts who ask for his help and are blithely rebuffed—so that card and narrative make a nicely ironic whole. ``Entrepreneur'' features the card ``La Muerte,'' Death, and concerns the increasingly fantastic efforts of a rich businessman to outwit mortality, culminating with his takeover of a monastery. Here, Mendoza's portrait is refreshingly angry and acidic. Other stories, however, seem unsurprising and rather labored. ``Rum Cake,'' for instance, a two-page story about a woman increasingly obsessed with the saxophonist who lives across the hall, turns largely on the last line, in which the narrator, who believes that the musician fancies her, is revealed to be delusional and immensely obese. The lengthy title story, while it sketches with great care the dynamics of a deeply disturbed family, turns on a revelation of sexual abuse that is far less surprising than the author seems to intend. ``9th of October,'' tracing the conversation of two friends the night before one of them is leaving to join the Armed Forces, demonstrates a nice grasp of the nature of intimacy between friends but lacks resonance or apparent purpose. A mixed collection, then, featuring some original work (Mendoza, like many young writers, is best when angry and on the attack) but also some pieces that read more like novice exercises than art. Still, craft and energy enough to suggest that Mendoza is a writer to watch.
Pub Date: March 16, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18129-9
Page Count: 128
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1998
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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