Thirteen stories, most depicting the various confusions of the clever and the young. Richter’s characters are usually young, and the better part of these carry their youth as heavily as they would a family curse they had not quite succeeded in forgetting. Rootless and ostensibly amoral, they sometimes succeed in accidentally uncovering some meaning in their lives—just as the teenaged narrator of “The Beauty Treatment” finds herself unexpectedly reconciled to the venomous classmate who once slashed her across the face with a razor. Similarly, the very Goth narrator of “Goal 666” finds that the musical style of his Doom/Black Metal band undergoes a sudden and completely unexpected transformation (i.e., it becomes melodic and harmonious) once all of the members have fallen in love with the young woman who joins it. “Prom Night” is precisely that: the recollection of a dance attended by several very stoned teenagers, at least one of whom comes to suspect by the end of the evening that she may once have been young and innocent after all. There’s also a certain amount of art-world surrealism: “Sally’s Story” describes the art career of a family dog who becomes famous for her sculptures and performance art, while “Rats Eat Cats” is the grant application (addressed to an arts committee) of an eccentric lady who lives alone with dozens of cats and makes sculptures (which she eventually sets aflame in performance work) out of their fur. The title story describes a typically modern take on the blind-date-from-hell routine, in which a San Francisco dominatrix acquires a slave through an Internet chat-room and eventually agrees to meet with him in person—with all the usual blind-date disappointments, and then some. A bit self-consciously arty, but a debut that’s nonetheless saved from its own pretensions by a good ear for dialogue (——Do you think we—re going to remember this, Bucky?” “We can get our picture taken,” he said. “Then it won—t matter” “) and a strong eye for character.
Pub Date: July 13, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-85701-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
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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