Big Pro shows his stuff. Boffo.
A short novel and four long stories, by veteran Forsyth (The Phantom of Manhattan, 1999, etc.).
The title piece, a British-style police procedural, moves brilliantly and richly through in Edmonton, Canada, where detective sergeant Jack Burns leads an investigation into the mugging of an older man brutally kicked in the street who dies after long days in a coma. Burns’s investigation turns up airtight evidence against two thugs, who are captured, held in custody for two or three weeks, but never brought to trial. A toweringly bright defense lawyer gets them off scot-free so that he can engineer a greater vengeance than the court’s. But a crucial plot point about the nameless victim isn’t made until after the murderers are freed. Did the lawyer pick up this essential piece of information from a police artist’s sketch of the unidentified victim? Well, “Vengeance is mine,” saith the Lord . . . maybe He told the lawyer. In “The Art of the Matter” (a cockney play on Graham Greene’s 1948 novel, The Heart of the Matter), stone-broke East End actor Trumpington “Trumpy” Gore, a spear carrier in a hundred British films who’s rarely had a line of more than three words, inherits a grimy 16th-century painting, has it appraised at an auction house, and gets cheated out of a million pounds. This leads to a revenge rip-off that calls for Woody Allen’s Zelig inserting actor Bob Hoskins into a dozen famous British costumers. “The Miracle” tells of a WWII visitation by Santa Caterina della Misericordia to the square in Siena where she was crucified 400 years ago; she now helps save hundreds of grievously wounded Germans and Allies, none of whom die. (But there’s a twist.) “The Citizen” turns on a drug bust on a Boeing 747, “Whispering Wind” on the lone survivor of Custer’s Last Stand.
Big Pro shows his stuff. Boffo.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28691-0
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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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