Malls, teenage pregnancy, casual sex, film studies: all related to the troubled equation between sex and love, which Erian...
Some of the nine stories in this debut collection have appeared in literary magazines, and they have the some of the subjects common in such venues: gender issues, bad girl sexuality, weird families, slacker students. But Erian fails to distinguish herself stylistically, offering instead slight fictions that can seem downright generic.
At her best, Erian discovers the brutality of love not just in sexual relations but in the twisted things family members do to one another. The fine, uncharacteristic "Still Life With Plaster" is told from a young girl's point of view; she and her brother live with their grandparents while their divorced mother goes to school, and the old folks, while seemingly mean and cantankerous, are really quite loving and affectionate in their own unsophisticated way. The grown-up brother and sister in "When Animals Attack" are more explicitly brutal: they hate their mother so intensely that when she sends a young runaway to seek their help, they badger him and encourage him to run away again. Most of Erian's pieces involve young women trying to figure out sex and the politics of desire: the older, promiscuous college student in "Standing Up to the Superpowers" uses her sexuality to tease professors into good grades—but fails anyway; the chubby 13-year-old in "Alcatraz" imagines that the popular boy across the street really loves her because she has sex with him almost daily, even though he won't look at her in school; and the promiscuous American exchange student in "Lass" marries the son of a famous Irish novelist, then develops a dangerous attraction with the father. In the title story, a ne'er-do-well couple work in a movie theater, and the woman fears that she has breast cancer.
Malls, teenage pregnancy, casual sex, film studies: all related to the troubled equation between sex and love, which Erian explores with a rookie's talents. Competent but not yet anything special.Pub Date: April 13, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50478-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
