A lugubrious first collection by the gay author (Ground Zero, 1988, etc.), whose nostalgie de la boue will win him few champions outside Christopher Street. Most of Holleran’s protagonists are veterans of the long struggle—first for tolerance, then for acceptance, and finally for simple survival—that defined gay history in America from the 1970s through ’90s, and most are understandably sad over the changes brought on by the AIDS epidemic. In “The Ossuary,” a small group of gay American tourists in Mexico meets another gay American who has just scattered the ashes of his dead lover in Oaxaca—only to have one of his bones stolen (for unknown reasons) by a Jesuit priest. “The Boxer” portrays the unhappy interaction of several graduate students sharing an old house in Iowa City, whereas “The Penthouse” centers on the more elaborate Manhattan apartment that is the center of a bitchy circle of art and fashion queens over some 20 years (during which many of them come to extremely sorrowful ends). “Petunias” and “The House Sitter” describe the drawn-out daily routines of Morgan, a middle-aged restaurant manager recently returned to New York after a long absence, and his constant, melancholy awareness that the gay world he knew in the ’70s is gone forever. “Amsterdam” is one man’s account of how his lover moves to that city in an attempt to find relief—through treatment or euthanasia—from the HIV virus he carries, and how he adjusts to life abroad. The title story is an elegy to the gay demimonde, set in a deserted Fire Island community in the quiet season after Labor Day. Too many variations on a single theme, without enough to distinguish one from the other. Holleran’s talent is very real, but his focus becomes constraining in short order.
Pub Date: June 2, 1999
ISBN: 0-7868-6461-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
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