The tough-guy realism and casual nihilism of Thom Jones, Denis Johnson, and Larry Brown (among others) is finding its expression in a second generation of new writers who often sacrifice the subtleties of language for the perfection of the pose. Such is the case with first-timer Lattimore. A typical Lattimore character will wonder out loud if we start life doomed or work our way there. Such white-trash philosophes include the aging slacker of the title story, who tried work once, didn't like it, and now lives in an inherited house with a young boy abandoned by his father, who doesn't seem to be returning any time soon. The depths of meanness surface in ``Dogs,'' in which the narrator recalls locking a friend in a cage and peeing on him; long-simmering anger is the ``sport'' of ``Family Sport''; here, the narrator's mother is losing touch with reality, and her father is not taking the change well. Cruelty is at the black heart of ``My Best Day Was the Third Grade,'' a rich man's memory of his childhood nastiness. The expectant father of ``Answer Me This'' considers splitting, then ends up in a fight at a 711. The result of disappearing parents is seen in ``Jarheads,'' about the son of a battered many-times married mom who makes some unlikely friends; and in ``Separate States,'' about a confused girl who lives with her long-gone mother's ex-husband, an uncommonly good dad, it turns out. The long ``Between Angels'' strikes a surprisingly slapstick note—it's the comic tale of a gangster's quest for proof of the existence of God as revealed by the Ark of the Covenant, supposedly stored in an L.A. warehouse. More tales from loserville by a promising, if somewhat derivative, newcomer.
Pub Date: Oct. 20, 1997
ISBN: 0-395-85407-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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