Fascinating work from a contemporary master.
A riveting collection of five tightly plotted long stories on a favorite Doctorow theme: the tension between American institutions and the criminal elements that undermine them.
In the first of its chronologically arranged narratives, “A House on the Plains,” blandly amoral young Earle describes life on the lam with his resourceful mother, a serial seducer and “widow of several insured husbands,” as they cut a murderous path through the heartland. “Baby Wilson” tells of an infant kidnapped from a hospital by a possibly insane beauty and her smitten accomplice; Doctorow deftly reverses our initial impressions of the two and even contrives a surprisingly benign ending. “Jolene: A Life” is a more generic account of a young female drifter’s progress through three disillusioning marriages toward premature middle age and disenfranchisement from even the tinselly pop-culture dreams that sustain her. “Walter John Harmon” depicts with quiet irony its unnamed narrator’s growing allegiance to a Kansas religious cult (The Community) spearheaded by an inarticulate underachiever with messianic delusions. The narrator dutifully acknowledges that his self-sacrificing mentor “took our evil unto himself” and passively accepts ultimate evidence of Harmon’s courageous embrace of “sin and disgrace”: his appropriation of the narrator’s beautiful wife and The Community’s donated wealth. It’s a tale Mark Twain might have contrived, capped by a savage, monitory final twist. “Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden” is even better, as a retired FBI agent recalls his investigation of the title incident, the suppression of its details by an embarrassed administration, and a journey to Texas that discloses a defiant gesture aimed at the conscienceless “men who run things.” The story unfolds with the fusion of authority, velocity, and suspense that made books like Ragtime and Billy Bathgate so vivid and memorable.
Fascinating work from a contemporary master.Pub Date: May 4, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6204-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
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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