It would be reductive, though not entirely unfair, to label this fitfully impressive first novel a gay Southeast Asian Like Water for Chocolate. The protagonist, Fong Mun, a Laotian resettled in California, has achieved security and minor fame as a chef and cookbook author, and has effectively buried his memories of enduring, then escaping, his beleaguered country's political chaos during the 1970s—until a handsome young countryman, Raymond, whom Fong Mun meets at a dinner party he's catering, solicits his life story, and the memories tumble forth, in flashback scenes juxtaposed against the pair's evening together, first in the kitchen, then in bed. Huo vividly renders the gradual capitulation of Fong Mun's city (Luang Prabang) to Communists who appropriate private property and schools, then dethrone Laos's monarchy at the time of the fall of Saigon. And he conveys with real feeling the multiple disorientations suffered by ``a boy who looked like a girl'' (and gradually realizes he's homosexual), separated from his family, then reunited with them in a refugee camp, where his mother and grandmother die. Fong Mun's narrative is pleasingly lucid, graced by occasional magical-realist touches (such as a ``chronic toothache'' that plagues Luang Prabang's entire populace). But the intervals that interrupt his tale for conversations with the sympathetic Raymond are redundant and filled with details of ethnic cookery unlikely to interest any reader not already devoted to Laotian cuisine. Furthermore, Huo races to the end: An enormity of climactic information (leading up to, then briefly describing, Fong Mun's move to America) is awkwardly crammed into the final 20 or so pages. The novel's central concept—that reconstructing recipes from memory is Fong Mun's way of recapturing and preserving the culture taken from him—is a moving one, and when Huo sticks closely to it, we're absorbed and persuaded by his story. An appealing debut that doesn't fully satisfy but does whet one's appetite for more of Huo's work.
Pub Date: April 2, 1998
ISBN: 0-525-94280-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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