A third collection from the ``postfeminist'' author whose previous works (Dog People, 1997, etc.) have established her as one of the quirkier voices on the scene today. As an editor of the Chick-Lit anthologies, Mazza has demonstrated great sensitivity to women's voices and women's cares, and these elements are certainly not overlooked here. Some of the pieces, like ``The Cram-It-In Method'' (which portrays a rather unworldly girl's preparations for her wedding to an even callower boy), examine feminine obsessions with men and families in tones that would be perfectly at home in Seventeen. Others, like ``The Career,'' which describes in a frank, harsh tone a naive teenager's extended affair with a brutish married man, will probably end up in one of Andrea Dworkin's footnotes somewhere along the line. ``The Something Bad'' follows a ``coupla-white-chicks-talking'' mode, in which three friends spend an afternoon ranting at each other about how their husbands have all turned out to be child molesters, and when will their boyfriends ever leave their wives, anyhow? Some of the works read more like fragments than stories: ``Dog & Girlfriend'' is the interior monologue of a girl dosing herself for a yeast infection she believes that she caught by sleeping with her best friend's father, while ``Laying Off the Secretary'' reads like the thought balloons for a comic strip on sexual harassment. The more ambitious stories work better: ``Adrenalin'' is an extraordinarily subtle portrait of how adultery saves the marriage of an unhappy young couple, and ``Copterport on Cowell's Mountain'' manages to make something out of the hopelessly overdone patient- and-shrink-scenario. A very mixed bag, but with some nice bits buried down deep. Mazza's talent can be striking when she chooses to exercise it.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-57366-033-7
Page Count: 145
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1997
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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