Sexy fun, lewd language and a little bit of reflection on sex and race in America.
Don’t be fooled by the inane title—there’s more to Price-Thompson’s latest than raunchy sex, although in a novel about sex addiction, you can be sure she covers everything from threesomes to brothers on the “downlow.”
Brothers Kevin and Emile are soldiers stationed at Fort Dix, and though they’ve made a success of themselves, it was a hard-won victory with a price. Traumatized by their foster mother Dirty Sue, Kevin is now a sex addict and Emile is a self-hating black man who’ll only be seen on the arm of a white woman. Trouble is not far off as Kevin pushes his wife Fancy into more and more sordid scenarios (he emails her with the evening’s instructions, usually involving some stranger who fits into any one of Kevin’s given fantasies) and Emile degrades every black woman in his command, including Fancy’s best friend Sparkle. Miss Sparkle is all that and then some, but when her friendship with Phil (a fellow soldier, but white) starts to heat up, she has to question everything that’s important to her regarding family, race and identity. Meanwhile, when Kevin and Fancy meet another swinging couple, Fancy surprises herself by loving the sex she’s having with Mica (her first time with a woman) and wonders what that means about her sexual orientation. While Fancy is enjoying Mica, Mica’s husband Derek takes Kevin to (unbeknownst to him) a downlow club, where Kevin is slipped a roofie and raped. The novel begins with a sassy wit, but becomes increasingly serious as the man who raped Kevin is diagnosed with HIV, Emile becomes desperately obsessed with his white girlfriend and Kevin plans a rape of his own. The author explores some provocative issues but it’s the sex talk that carries the book. Frisky and erotically honest, occasionally the language slips into the realm of silliness.
Sexy fun, lewd language and a little bit of reflection on sex and race in America.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-345-47723-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
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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