A disaffected new voice that doesn’t offer a lot of depth and warmth.
Ranging from sour and superficial to occasionally moving, an uneven eight stories treat urban gay angst, for the most part, by a newcomer published in Open City.
The best of this unpolished collection is “Disability,” the first-person account of a youngish gay man on prolonged disability who lives in a basement in Queens, drinks a lot, and is generous toward his friends, though rejects a handsome lover for himself because he’s ashamed, at bottom, that he’s a “fuckup.” Here, McIntyre demonstrates a terrific sense of control and character development, allowing each of the man’s friends to uncoil suspensefully through dialogue and action. “Foray,” similarly, pursues a potentially charged relationship between a teenaged boy who retreats into his books while on holiday at his grandparents’ beach house and his younger cousin with Down syndrome, Vance. Assigned the educational task of reading Moby Dick to Vance, Raymond recognizes through the enthralled reaction of his cousin the power of the word: “He loved the story in a way I couldn’t, and it put me to shame.” Other stories lack the same thoughtful delineation of character, such as the first, “Binge,” a glib-feeling account of a married woman’s evening at a meaningless party sneaking “bumps” from her bag of cocaine; or the bizarrely misdirected “Sahara,” which follows the kidnapping of a restaurant’s kangaroo mascot by a group of idiot high-schoolers who mistake him for the rival team’s wolverine. “Octo” concerns the creepy affection that a troubled young boy (hostilely considered “retarded” by his schoolmates and sister) develops for his growing, carnivorous octopus. And “ONJ.com” explores the easygoing party friendship gone terribly awry between a graphic designer making her way successfully in New York and the charming gay man she hires. McIntyre chooses to tie these stories up hastily, giving the entire collection a half-baked, amateurish feel.
A disaffected new voice that doesn’t offer a lot of depth and warmth.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1433-6
Page Count: 325
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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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