An uneven collection focusing on men, worth sifting through for the gems.
In this collection of short fiction, gay men struggle with relationships, sexuality, and life.
The volume’s six stories primarily explore the experiences of a variety of gay men. These range from a privileged high school athlete, trying to figure out his place in the world, to men just past youth seeking to make their way in Manhattan, to an aging man whiling away his final days in an upstate New York nursing home. The cleverer that Hill (Myxocene, 2015, etc.) gets, the less engaging his stories become. In the titular tale, an elderly man tries to comprehend the concepts—such as polyandry and nonbinary gender identity—that inform his grown grandchildren’s lives. While the narrator’s well-meaning attempts at understanding remain endearing, too much emphasis is placed on the premise, giving the account a sitcom feeling. The collection’s one dud, “The Prince and the Executioner,” is set “long ago in the Frenglish Kingdom of Facedom.” The faux medieval surroundings are apparently meant as a lens to establish a parable around real issues—a key question presented is “how could the King tolerate a Prince turned Princess?”—but the conceit, speech, and plot become too stilted and haphazard. On the other hand, the two stories situated in the more expected locale of early 21st-century Manhattan are very powerful. In both “The Nose” and “The Dried Plum and the Envelope,” heavy-drinking gay men circling 30 find ways to come to terms with disappointment and the choices they’ve made. Hill firmly controls the (very different) voices of each of these characters, and he deftly builds to moments of quiet betrayal. The elderly narrator of “The Final Plan” inhabits some of the same territory when he reminisces about his life in pre-AIDS Manhattan, “a place where you could feel sort of like you belonged and relatively safe.” Unfortunately, this tale soon veers into a convoluted nursing home drama. Hill’s exploration of the lives of gay men in New York is strong, nuanced, and originally drawn. The volume should be picked up for these narratives, but readers will likely wish Hill had stuck to this terrain throughout the book.
An uneven collection focusing on men, worth sifting through for the gems.Pub Date: May 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5305-6707-2
Page Count: 228
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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