Winner and still champion Jones takes this one on points. His second collection (The Pugilist at Rest, 1993) of rock-hard stories goes the distance, surviving on adrenaline, killer instinct, and artistry. Most of these ten ready-to-rumble stories have appeared in major magazines (The New Yorker, Playboy, Esquire), so some of the edges have been smoothed, but Jones's relentlessly existential protagonists are as manic as ever: The jittery hustlers, gonzo hopheads, and Dex-mad chatterers engage us viscerally, as do the sad zombies who drool through Haldol and other psychotropic drugs. Jones is a walking physician's desk manual, frequently indulging his medical obsessions. A number of pieces concern doctors, many of them burned out by prolonged exposure to Third World horror. In the title story, ``a bleak post-African depression'' engulfs a doctor back in the States, where he's lost his license to practice and where his self-lobotomized sister wastes away in an institution. Like many of Jones's hypersensitive protagonists, this one uses the weather as a barometer of his internal mood swings; relief comes from a quick game of Russian roulette. ``Pain and trouble'' dog the weary old-timer of ``Superman, My Son,'' whose 40-ish son has just come out of a manic episode. In Africa, a copywriter—legendary for his ability to overcome ``donor weariness''—sets off on a pill- popping jag (``Quicksand''), while a doctor from New Zealand drowns his cynicism in booze (``Way Down Deep in the Jungle''). The suicidal duet of ``I Need a Man to Love Me'' probes ``the eternal vortex of hell'' where death is relief from a life spent in a wheelchair or as a probable lifer in jail. The gym rats, disgruntled marines, and aging pickpockets who people Jones's stories are all desperate for moments of solace, if not a glimmer of transcendence. Raw, powerful, and pulpy: an intense volume that's like staring at a gaping wound, something making it so you can't—or don't want to—look away.
Pub Date: June 6, 1995
ISBN: 0-316-47307-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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