A careful portrait of a very small world: likely to appeal to New Yorkers and New York-ophiles but not-so-likely to travel...
An elegant if somewhat mannered collection of nine stories, mostly set within the confines of a single apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
West 89th Street between Riverside Drive and West End Avenue is one of those pleasant New York residential blocks made all the more pleasant by being off the beaten track of tourists and day-trippers. Built as an exclusive enclave for the well-to-do, however, the Upper West Side had become somewhat down at the heels and vaguely disreputable during the period (the 1970s and ’80s) of most of these tales. “Musée des Beaux Arts,” for example, offer a resident’s recollections of a demented proctologist who lived upstairs and lost his son in a freak accident (the boy made a pair of wings and, from the rooftop, tried to imitate Icarus). “Bachelor Party” describes the perverse love affair that a Jewish graduate student at Columbia carries on with the daughter of his faculty adviser (an erstwhile Nazi). In “Wakefield, 7e,” several schoolboys become obsessed with a ghostlike tenant who moves in across the hall from one of them, while the narrator of “The Inventor of Love” is a melancholy account of two gay men who adopt a boy from a troubled family but find themselves unable to cope with the pressures of parenthood. The title story is by far the longest and strangest: Borrowing from Fitzgerald’s story of a boy who was born old and grew younger, it creates a history of the strange young man in the apartment upstairs who entered the world in 1912 when he sprang from his mother’s womb as an elderly, bearded Jew and dashed his assimilationist father’s hopes of passing himself off as a Christian.
A careful portrait of a very small world: likely to appeal to New Yorkers and New York-ophiles but not-so-likely to travel well.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-393-05151-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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