Himes (d. 1984) is well served by this collection of 61 stories (25 never before published): mostly short takes that deal with the black experience, ranging from impoverishment and prison life to the excesses and satisfactions of religion. While there's a good deal of rage here, and the tone of many pieces is sardonic, Himes is at his best when he qualifies such rage with dramatic irony. In ``Headwaiter,'' for example, Dick Small (``Flawless service for discriminating guests evokes in him a complete satisfaction'') does not so much recognize racism and his own lowly status as take on the patronizing tone of his white employers in his dealings with underlings. In ``A Nigger,'' Joe, a black woman's lover, listens from the closet as her elderly white sugar-daddy asserts his ownership, then opens the closet to look at Joe ``as if he was another garment he had bought for her.'' Such shadow play between the races reaches its bitter apex in ``A Modern Fable,'' a satire of Senator McDull, who can't understand why a worker would take a shot at him for opposing the WPA. In ``Dirty Deceivers,'' a couple, both pretending to be white, finally confess their pretense, only to begin ``feeling betrayed by each other.'' Other highlights: prison stories (``Prison Mass,'' Himes's most formally ambitious; ``Pork Chop Paradise,'' the story of a prisoner who becomes a successful street-preacher before a lust-filled decline) and a host of very short sketches that make their points and then stop. Himes will be best remembered for his Harlem detective novels (Cotton Comes to Harlem, etc.) and other longer narratives. While some of the pieces here read like dated magazine fiction, the best rise above their time and bear witness to the racism that compromised the humanity of white and black alike.
Pub Date: May 15, 1991
ISBN: 1-56025-020-8
Page Count: 446
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
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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