From Booker-winner Jhabvala (Shards of Memory, 1995, etc.) comes fourteen compressed stories (five published previously), mostly set in New Delhi or New York, in which themes of rivalry, family discord, and loyalty at odds with convention are explored with consummate grace and skill. For the six tales from India, the ministerial level of civil service in the generations living after Indian independence (1947) offers a frequent point of departure: In one story (—Independence—), a woman lends her expertise to arranging proper social functions for less sophisticated members of the new Indian ruling class, thereby rousing the scorn of her drunken poet husband, and finds a sweet but fitful solace in the arms of a general being groomed as Minister of Defense; in another, a college boy, expected by his mother to follow in the footsteps of her illustrious family, falters when his girlfriend’s father, prominent in government, is forced from office in a bribery scandal (“A New Delhi Romance”). As for the seven New York pieces, a curious picture of life on the Upper East Side emerges as sex looms large to skew normal relations: A young wife watches as her husband pursues various men from their beach house, then has to put up with her mother falling head over heels for one of his conquests (“A Summer by the Sea”). Elsewhere, a daughter’s preference for carpentry and the willowy clerk in a cheese shop is not what her frosty, chauffeur-driven mama had in mind (“Broken Promises”). The gem here, though, is set in London, where an ÇmigrÇ writer’s struggle to balance a need for both his wife and his mistress is observed by his young granddaughter (“Two Muses”). Each piece of Jhabvala’s worldly mosaic offers precise, subtle views of people who are trying to make the best of their lives: their essential humanity remains compelling—even if their circumstances sometimes seem too much alike.
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1998
ISBN: 1-887178-50-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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