A newcomer with a promising imagination—and at least one good story to his credit.
A debut collection full of the usual suspects: people who have made bad decisions, who have married wrong, or who are inexplicably sad about life and... go on and on about it. Then, at the close, they experience a brief epiphany.
Greer is good at the set-up. There is a substitute tutor who takes his charge to prep-school interviews not knowing until the end that the little fellow is relating to the deans of each institution the tall tales and personal anecdotes with which the tutor has been amusing him. A young boy’s mother forgets her lines in the middle of a small-town production of The Mikado, and life seems to unravel afterward. A man and woman marry in college not because they’re in love but because they’re gay and want the cover that a marriage will give. Ultimately, however, they find that their platonic love survives their deepest lust for others. These stories, though, are spun out of the loosest yarn. Images are strained (“The autumn trees are quaking their crisp hands above it all, dropping them in dozens to the field, lurid hands or gloves thrown into a ring”), the writing awkward (“... James Hilary feebly adjusting a bright bow tie in his seat”). All but one piece are marred by an omniscient narrator who, like an irritating companion at a movie, cannot resist the temptation to interrupt the story and tell us what lies ahead: “This thing they both believed in, despite the common sense that it would fail (and it would fail).” The strongest piece, “Come Live withMe and Be My Love”—about the college kids who marry—has few of these intrusions and Greer doesn’t engage in vague poetic image-making. Instead, he creates two people who act and react for discernible purposes and whose lives might matter to a reader for the time it takes to turn these pages.
A newcomer with a promising imagination—and at least one good story to his credit.Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-24105-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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
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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