A slender collection of six stories from Cuban-born Su†rez (The Cutter, Latin Jazz), though infused with a sense of quiet alienation and existential despair, vividly evokes Hispanic- American life. Whether the character is a young Cuban exile working as a painter; a boy helping his immigrant father sell ice-cream; a son forced to condone his father's illegal gambling; or a Hispanic- American college student trying to forget his unhappy family—all share a sense of being outsiders caught up in situations not of their choosing. In ``Welcome to the Oasis,'' the longest and most accomplished piece here, the young man employed to paint the apartment block discovers that in its own way the place is as riddled with fears and tensions as Cuba was. With fatal results, he's reluctantly drawn into the lives of the other Cuban exiles who live in the block. In another notable story, ``A Perfect Hotspot,'' a high-school student who'd prefer to be working as a life-guard must help his immigrant father sell ice-cream from a shabby truck. Ashamed of the truck, and of his father's treatment of the customers, the boy daydreams about swimming; but though his father eventually lets him go—``Dreamers like you learn the hard way''— he knows he will have to pay and braces himself for the ensuring violence. When a college student returns home (``Headshots'') and learns that his younger brother has been arrested for drug possession, he's reminded by his father that ``what had happened to my brother could never happen to me.'' But he recalls a drug and drinking spree in New Orleans in which he tried to forget his unhappy parents ``who hated one another, not because of what they had become, but because of what each had depleted in the other.'' A tightly controlled but affecting exploration of fundamental tensions in a community for whom Su†rez is becoming an eloquent and promising voice.
Pub Date: May 1, 1992
ISBN: 1-55885-043-0
Page Count: 124
Publisher: Arte Público
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1992
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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