Might well amuse the slacker crowd, but more demanding readers will find the laughs ultimately hollow.
A stylish but ultimately slight debut collection of nine stories: think early Lorrie Moore, but without the empathy and insight.
Canadian writer Gartner strikes the obligatory hipster pose of ironic detachment without delivering much in the way of feeling. Nonetheless, she uses her sharp wit to deft advantage in portraying a parade of clever, observant, sardonic female protagonists who are, generally speaking, fed up: with men, their jobs, their lives. In `City of My Dreams,` a young woman working in a soap and cosmetics store in Vancouver reviews with stinging humor some of the absurd twists her life has taken. The most striking story here, `The Nature of Pure Evil,` centers on Hedy, whose lover has left her to marry another woman. First, she avenges herself by calling in a phony bomb threat to a restaurant where she knows the two are dining. Then things snowball, and Hedy begins to make random bomb threats having nothing to do with her lover; she gets a subversive thrill out of calling the shots and seeing people dance to her tune. Nothing much happens in this tale—nothing of real consequence happens in any of the stories—but it exemplifies Gartner's quirky voice and her feel for the way people drift through their lives without ever giving away what they're really thinking. But a little of Gartner's style goes a long way: a story can only skate so far on attitude alone, and one hungers for a character that doesn't evaporate the moment the page is turned.
Might well amuse the slacker crowd, but more demanding readers will find the laughs ultimately hollow.Pub Date: June 13, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-49911-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
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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