A debut collection of tough, angry tales about American arrogance and the world’s woes. While the plots of some of the stories feel forced, the anger never does. “Will You Say Something, Monsieur Elliot?” traces the moral education of a wealthy American, lost at sea when his sailboat goes down. Half dead, he’s fished from the water by a boatload of Haitians attempting to flee to Florida. Packed on a sinking ship, without food and or much water, the Haitians are convinced they will be saved because the Americans will surely search for their countryman. As they begin to die, Elliot is exposed to a world far more harsh and unforgiving than he had previously imagined. “The Hotel on Monkey Forest Road” unravels the different fates of two men sent to Bali to build a luxury hotel. One plunges forward with the job, despite local protest. The other becomes fascinated, then almost unhinged, by the Balinese reverence for nature and their belief in a simpler lifestyle. His efforts to retard Western inroads are, of course, unsuccessful. Most of these pieces depict the Americans'aside from the few who side with the hard-pressed locals'as crude and violent, yet blithely innocent. In “Ceau'escu’s Cat,” a freethinking Romanian journalist barely eludes the dictator’s thugs, gets stranded in Nevada, and is offended by the ignorance of the Americans he meets, who are baffled by his appetite for opposition and ideas. “The Mayor of Saint John” portrays a Virgin Islands mayor trying vainly to oppose the affluent Americans displacing his people to construct grand homes, convinced that their seizure of land will inevitably bring a “better” life to the locals. In the process the intruders guiltlessly destroy the old communal culture. Anger sometimes overcomes art in these tales, but they're genuine and persuasive enough to signal the presence of something uncommon among today’s writers: an old-fashioned social critic and moralist.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-15-100489-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
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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