Tedious and trite debut. Nothing new here.
Ten stories about men and women in crisis cover familiar ground with no particular flair.
The title story starts off with a heavy hand. On a beach getaway aimed at reconciliation, Paul’s wife, as he starts to reheat his coffee in the microwave, admonishes him: “If you drink it fresh, right after it’s brewed, you’ll get the benefit of its antioxidants. Reheat it, and you’re simply distilling the toxins.” “Just like our relationship,” Paul thinks to himself. The unlisted phone rings, and mysteriously Paul is talking with a terrified woman whose Santa Barbara–bound plane is plunging toward the ocean. By the end of the conversation with the doomed woman, Paul sees the world anew, recognizing how precious life is. But Liz doesn’t. Blake, a wannabe teacher turned editor with a half-finished novel in a drawer, hangs out at a sports bar and gets into trouble by losing bets with a Russian loan shark who demands (“Lesson Plan”) that Blake tutor his son for payment. Too late, he realizes how much he has lost. “All the Same” pits a pedantic professor against a Smith-educated hooker in an encounter her pimp calls “masturbation of the intellect” (the setting is tropical, and the professor “took in the weight of the full moon above, against an immense blanket of stars. Then the iridescent blue of the swimming pool distracted him . . . . ”). Cindy, in “Filagree,” celebrates the third month of living with Raymond by getting a rose tattooed on each breast. But Raymond’s attitude toward her and Mickey, the tattoo artist, leads to much bickering. Will she let Mickey finish the job, despite the pain? That’s all there is to this slight story, while “Matinee,” about a couple deciding to see a movie, is equally thin, and “Saving Grace,” a rambling therapy session as a country singer explores the last hours of his brother’s life, has less emotional strength than it should.
Tedious and trite debut. Nothing new here.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-59264-084-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Toby Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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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