Fans and new readers alike will appreciate Boyle's droll humor, eye for detail, and seemingly inexhaustible imagination.
The prolific Boyle provides high entertainment in his latest story collection.
With novels that are all over the map in subject matter as well as quality, Boyle has proven hit (The Road to Wellville, 1993; San Miguel, 2012) and miss (The Terranauts, 2016). His batting average is higher in this collection, in which stories about global warming, cybertechnology, and genetic engineering show him addressing not only the first part of the 21st century, but whatever future it may anticipate. The title story, which has already been anthologized in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, imagines our culture's next step in technological self-absorption: a device that allows people to revisit any part of their past history. For many, the Relive Box's utility begins as personalized pornography, but users find it so addictive that they’re soon revisiting, for hours on end, pretty much any moment that allows them to escape the present. Narrating the story is a divorced father of a 15-year-old girl. He wants to limit her time on the device (where she turns back to a time when her family was intact), but mainly he wants to use it himself, to get lost in the box, “pinned here in this chair like an exhibit in a museum, blind to anything but the past, my past and nobody else’s, not hers or her mother’s, or the country’s or the world’s, but just mine.” Many of the stories have narrators with blinders on, whether it’s a mathematician convinced he’s on the verge of a prizewinning breakthrough as his household suffers a plague of ants (“The Argentine Ant”), a cartoonist wreaking revenge on his girlfriend through the creation of “Warrior Jesus,” or a “high midlist” novelist who had “written about death to the point of obsession” but now finds it hitting a little too close to home (“Subtract One Death”).
Fans and new readers alike will appreciate Boyle's droll humor, eye for detail, and seemingly inexhaustible imagination.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-267339-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
PROFILES
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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