That forcing and a tendency to pile on are the only things preventing the dark vision of this smart, hip, supertalented...
Freaks, misfits and addicts crowd this second collection from Lipsyte (The Ask, 2010, etc.); his stories are beyond mordant.
An older man abandons his dying wife for his girlfriend in "The Worm in Philly." Lipsyte’s characters inhabit a cold, hard world, but Tovah Gold is desperate to fit somewhere, somehow in "The Climber Room." The preschool teacher, still single at 36, wants a baby. Her fantasy of marriage to the school’s richest donor crumbles when the old goat starts out by masturbating. (If you’re wondering about the collection’s title, check your body.) The situation of Mandy, in "Deniers," is even more dire. A recovering addict, she has just extricated herself from a destructive relationship with a fellow addict when she becomes involved with her stalker. Cal, with his violently anti-Semitic past, is hardly an appropriate mate for a nice Jewish girl. That stalker seems tame compared to the prize freak in "The Wisdom of the Doulas." Mitch is an overweight, potty-mouthed “lactation consultant” who assists postpartum mothers. Problem is, Mitch wants some of that mother’s milk for himself. It gets physical between him and the outraged father; violence is a constant in Lipsyte’s world. "The Republic of Empathy" ends with an inoffensive young father being burned to a crisp in a drone attack; yes, folks, drones are coming to an American neighborhood near you. What Gunderson fears, in "The Real-Ass Jumbo," is that the whole world may end. The newly minted prophet gives us about five years, “time enough to sample all the yearning young hippie tang.” This scintillating black comedy ends (surprise) violently. There are times, though, when the violent ending seems willed and gratuitous. The high school coach in "Ode to Oldcorn" is a fervent admirer of the champion shot putter. Was it really necessary for their reunion to end in broken bones?
That forcing and a tendency to pile on are the only things preventing the dark vision of this smart, hip, supertalented writer from being truly memorable.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-29890-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
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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