Self's celebrated perversity (My Idea of Fun, 1994, etc.) largely goes on holiday in this second collection (after The Quantity Theory of Insanity, 1995). This time, nine stories (four of them previously published) remain close in theme to earlier work while falling well short of Self's mastery of the blackly comic. The first piece, ``Between the Conceits''—in which one of the only eight real people in London describes the rules of a game involving incessant manipulations of his ``people'' to gain advantage over his competitors—most closely approximates Self's knack for imagining a freakish society with disturbing echoes of the real one. Similarly, ``Chest'' conjures up a nightmarish England whose inhabitants are sickened by a constant, choking smog that leaves them dependent on inhalers and at risk of death if they tarry outside. Otherwise, these tales range from complete misses to insubstantial set pieces clustered around a single riveting detail. In ``Incubus,'' an intricately carved, magnificently phallic screen from the 17th century adorns an otherwise nondescript house (and story), casting a lusty spell on an aging philosophy professor and his adoring graduate student; in ``Inclusion,'' a psychoactive drug prepared from the corpses and fecal matter of bee mites is given a clandestine trial by a pharmaceutical company, with results that are disastrous but unremarkable; and in ``The End of the Relationship,'' the volume's raw but lifeless finale, a woman's despair over a rift with her boyfriend propels her into a series of encounters with couples at odds with each other. Evidence of a savage talent still exists in this mÇlange, but the mesmerizing quality of Self's earlier sordid, in-your-face images is too often absent—while what remains is pedestrian, if not downright dull. (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-87113-620-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
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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