Still, a subtle and sometimes compelling vision of Los Angeleno life.
From the latest Flannery O’Connor Award winner, a debut collection of nine stories mainly about being young and black in southern California.
All are told in the first person, usually by young middle-class black women who find themselves in intimate relationships with non-blacks. In the opener, “Melvin in the Sixth Grade,” 11-year-old Avery moves from inner-city L.A. to the suburbs, where she develops a crush on class maverick Melvin Bukeford, himself a recent transplant from Oklahoma, “sporting a crew cut in 1981 when everyone else had long scraggly hair like the guys in Judas Priest or Journey.” As the only black girl in the class, Avery forges a bond with her Oklahoman fellow outsider, only to have this bond tested when the crowd turns against Melvin. Avery returns in the final story, “Markers,” where she’s back in L.A., in her late 20s, married to a wealthy Italian chef and making periodic visits to the suburbs to help her lonely middle-aged mother. In this, perhaps the strongest entry, Avery is stranded in a no-man’s-land between two worlds: her mother’s, which she can never return to, and her husband’s, to which she can never really hope to belong. This kind of deracination is shared by many here: the former stripper from “Break Any Woman Down,” whose relationship with a Greek porno actor is ruined by her well-intended affection for his friend; the photo-lab clerk in “Clay’s Thinking,” who gets in over his head with a wealthy executive woman; and the middle-aged woman from “Bars,” who has an unfortunate encounter with a man she met in a chat room. Johnson’s narrators are sympathetic and engaging, but the tales rely so heavily on vocal performances, with correspondingly less emphasis on plot or emotional movement, that they sometimes seem more like voice-riffs than full stories.
Still, a subtle and sometimes compelling vision of Los Angeleno life.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8203-2315-2
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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
Told through the points of view of the four Garcia sisters- Carla, Sandi, Yolanda and Sofia-this perceptive first novel by poet Alvarez tells of a wealthy family exiled from the Dominican Republic after a failed coup, and how the daughters come of age, weathering the cultural and class transitions from privileged Dominicans to New York Hispanic immigrants. Brought up under strict social mores, the move to the States provides the girls a welcome escape from the pampered, overbearingly protective society in which they were raised, although subjecting them to other types of discrimination. Each rises to the challenge in her own way, as do their parents, Mami (Laura) and Papi (Carlos). The novel unfolds back through time, a complete picture accruing gradually as a series of stories recounts various incidents, beginning with ``Antojos'' (roughly translated ``cravings''), about Yolanda's return to the island after an absence of five years. Against the advice of her relatives, who fear for the safety of a young woman traveling the countryside alone, Yolanda heads out in a borrowed car in pursuit of some guavas and returns with a renewed understanding of stringent class differences. ``The Kiss,'' one of Sofia's stories, tells how she, married against her father's wishes, tries to keep family ties open by visiting yearly on her father's birthday with her young son. And in ``Trespass,'' Carla finds herself the victim of ignorance and prejudice a year after the Garcias have arrived in America, culminating with a pervert trying to lure her into his car. In perhaps one of the most deft and magical stories, ``Still Lives,'' young Sandi has an extraordinary first art lesson and becomes the inspiration for a statue of the Virgin: ``Dona Charito took the lot of us native children in hand Saturday mornings nine to twelve to put Art into us like Jesus into the heathen.'' The tradition and safety of the Old World are just part of the tradeoff that comes with the freedom and choice in the New. Alvarez manages to bring to attention many of the issues-serious and light-that immigrant families face, portraying them with sensitivity and, at times, an enjoyable, mischievous sense.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-945575-57-2
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
PROFILES
APPRECIATIONS
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