Talented and witty, but aimed squared at the Ally McBeal set.
Sixteen debut tales about the wacky lives of modern women and their relationships with wacky men.
One of Crane’s narrators, who could be all of Crane’s narrators, says, “These are the boys you think about. The very fact that you use the word boys, at your age, says a lot.” Yes, it does. The best effort here is the first, “The Archetype’s Girlfriend,” which achieves humor and insight while maintaining a steady second-person delivery straight out of Pam Houston. The story is a harsh but accurate picture of men created indirectly through picturing the kind of woman for whom men routinely destroy their lives. “You Take Naps” is another second-person account, this time of a woman’s date with a younger man and her preoccupation with that fact. The title piece is yet another second-person farce, about another date—to see West Side Story on DVD with a guy who has a New York accent. Some of Crane’s efforts are what Raymond Carver once called “funny-looking” stories: “The Super Fantastic New Zealand Triangle” is a fantasy affair conducted mostly in footnotes (without David Foster Wallace, one can assume, this would have never come to be) and is more interesting for its strategy than its story; and “The Daves” is a semi-smart pastiche of the presumably masculine numbering and lettering of scholarly writing. These are less stories, however, than monologues (the characters often use words like “quasi-feminist” and “superlame”). Of longer pieces, a standout is “An Intervention,” about a woman’s experience in AA that leads, you guessed it, to more bad dates with cardboard men, so that she needs rescue more from them than from alcohol. Crane’s is the art of writing a lot without saying much. The result, while often funny, usually adds up to no more than that.
Talented and witty, but aimed squared at the Ally McBeal set.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2003
ISBN: 0-316-09652-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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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