Probably not for anyone on this planet or any other, but a successful cross-genre experiment, and a welcome addition to what...
A dozen smart tales that travel far and wide to straddle the line between SF and literary—in a first collection from novelist Scholz (Radiance, 2002).
Most of these pieces originally appeared in SF magazines (Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction), though they might just as easily have appeared in mainstream literary quarterlies, and some did (The Missouri Review, Crank!). The first, “The Eve of the Last Apollo,” tells of an ex-astronaut’s post-moon ennui colliding with his 40th birthday and the final moon shot, a combination that creates the ultimate midlife crisis; the title story is about an unwitting insurance salesman traveling to Europe for some Kafkaesque turns of fate—and perhaps a friendship with K. himself; “The Nine Billion Names of God” is the epistolary exchange between an editor and a writer, “Carter Scholz,” who is either a plagiarist or an artful borrower; while “A Catastrophe Machine” is the life story of a young man whose guilt, possibly, has tangible effects in the form of a machine that may shape the course of history; and a lonely man (“Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor”) observes sex in a neighboring apartment, an experience that, combined with his lifelong bachelor’s ethic, triggers a bizarre masturbatory fantasy involving his furniture. Other stories follow scholars into the Louvre or listen in on men’s conversations with futuristic computers. Scholz co-authored Kafka Americana with Jonathan Lethem, and it shows: these tales are always alert, and their knowledge extends well beyond the predictable mayhem and pyrotechnics of science fiction. The old is always as important as the new or the yet to be invented, and human emotion, rather than firefights or contact with aliens, is always the goal.
Probably not for anyone on this planet or any other, but a successful cross-genre experiment, and a welcome addition to what stories can do.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-26901-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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
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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