Blips (sometimes) of modern drollery, glimpsed on quickly turned pages, then gone forever.
Britisher Rhodes appears to enter the contest for smallest book of the year, offering 101 pieces said each to be 101 words long. But he doesn’t take the prize from the reigning Marty Asher, whose Boomer (p. 400) also had 101 tiny sections.
The subject is love as Rhodes’s “I” tells non-tales of ex or current lovers with names (sometimes) like Celestia, Xanthe, Zazie, Azure, Iolanthe, Running Water, Nightjar, January, Skylark, Orchid, and—well, that’s ten, and, besides, you get the idea. What actually to think of these many little pieces, though, may be better left to individual readers. Some are quite ugly, like “Kissing,” which begins, “Since the moment we met, my wife and I have not stopped kissing,” and ends, “Our lips are four broken scabs, and our chins always covered in blood, but we will never stop. We are far too much in love.” Satire, yes, but of what, exactly? Movie kissing? The answer may be evident here and there. Sometimes, as in “Indifferent,” there’s humor not yet so dry as to disappear altogether: “When, besotted, I casually suggested we get married, she shrugged her shoulder and, yawning, said, ‘Whatever.’” The spirit of Donald Barthelme hovers over some of the pages, as in “Normal”: “After a blazing row, Harmony joined the nuns. ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘I’m joining the nuns.’” But Harmony didn’t like it with the nuns and came back, allowing Rhodes one of his humor’s higher flights: “‘We had to get up really early,’” says Harmony, “‘and they made us wear horrible long black dress things and no make-up, and sing all these boring songs.’” “Thankfully,” the tale concludes, “things quickly returned to normal, and now she’s back to spending her free time joining in with the commercials on TV, and making me get up from the sofa so she can look for her lighter.”
Blips (sometimes) of modern drollery, glimpsed on quickly turned pages, then gone forever.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50421-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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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