Too often exalts glibness over insight.
Bad reality-TV concepts and self-help jargon dog the protagonists of Crane’s third collection (All This Heavenly Glory, 2005, etc.).
These stories resemble blog rants—apologias expressed in straggly sentences replete with breezy pop-culture patois. The writing echoes the diction and deadpan socioeconomic commentary of George Saunders and Julie Hecht, with little of the subtlety. Reality television and quirky religions figure heavily in the characters’ worldviews. A woman practices revisionism through exclamation points (“My Life is Awesome! And Great!”). “Betty the Zombie” joins a Lifetime show about dysfunctional women attempting to “reignite” their lives. “Banana Love” and its companion piece, “Notes for a Story about People with Weird Phobias,” take “avoidance issues” to absurd heights, as when a character imagines doing time for bludgeoning an annoyingly fashionable and thin girl. In “Clearview,” the eponymous town and its occupants achieve redemption through Whole Foods and grande lattes. Celebrity worship is a predictable motif: “The Glistening Head of Ricky Ricardo Begs Further Experimentation” explains how to harvest mini-celebrities; in “Emmanuel,” a longed-for child morphs into Ethan Hawke (“post-Uma/Before Sunset”). “Sally (Featuring: Lollipop the Rainbow Unicorn)” likes herself, which renders her close to bludgeonably annoying. “What Happens When the Mipods Leave their Milieu” is most Saunders-esque in its tale of two innocents, members of a benign cult martyred for their lack of irony. “Donovan’s Closet,” about salvation at Barney’s, and the title story, about a happiness art installation, are, in the words of that story’s narrator, “probably the part where most people would say Whaaaaa?” The most effective stories drop the blasé veneer. “What Our Week Was Like” manages a profound statement about loss of youth. “Varieties of Loudness in Chicago” nostalgically evokes a run-down but rapidly gentrifying urban neighborhood. “Promise” is a reckless guarantee of perfect parenting.
Too often exalts glibness over insight.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-933354-43-9
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Punk Planet/Akashic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
