An appealing collection, though Earle fans will find a lot more to enjoy than everybody else.
An engaging if uneven debut from one of country rock’s most celebrated singer-songwriters.
Earle enjoys the usual advantages—and faces the usual problems—of new writers whose names are already well known from their work in other fields. Like Jimmy Stewart, Kirk Douglas, and Jewel, Earle has an eager audience ready to pounce on and adore any new material; on the other hand, readers not initiated in the Steve Earle cult might have the knee-jerk reaction of not taking his literary work seriously. The mitigating circumstance in this celebrity-fiction is that in his songs Earle has already demonstrated his storytelling skills—not to mention that he’s lived a grittier life (heroin, prison, rehab) than most of the famous who “try their hand” at fiction. The characters here are downtrodden, solitary types: a crack-addicted musician, a Vietnam vet flying drugs to Mexico, etc. Earle’s narrative voice sounds like an sage in a smoky bar, and several of the stories’ openings are strikingly deft: “Pick any means of transportation, public or private, over land, sea, or air. No matter which direction you travel, it takes three hours to get out of L.A.”; or “Harold Mills died last night, alone in his $75-a-week room at the Drake Motel, and I’m probably the only motherfucker on Murfreesboro Road that misses him. Hell, I’m the only one that knows he’s gone.” After such strong beginnings, though, Earle can’t sustain the pitch, and as his descriptions go flat some of his tales slip into melodrama. Nevertheless, the best two or three—particularly “The Red Suitcase”—have all the earthy virtues of a good folk song.
An appealing collection, though Earle fans will find a lot more to enjoy than everybody else.Pub Date: June 13, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-04026-9
Page Count: 207
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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