A punchy array of ruminations that perfectly mirrors its title.
A short story collection that’ll get you thinking about New York grit, sex, and punk.
In these 14 new and selected stories and one novella, an expansive cast of characters navigates through aging and sexuality. Indiana’s (Last Seen Entering the Biltmore, 2010, etc.) work plunges its reader right into the middle of the action. For example, in “Romanian Conversation,” two American men discuss vices and promiscuity, but the conversation occurs without any context. Readers have no idea who these characters are, nor are they ever really told what the background is. This is the common denominator throughout the work. Indiana moves through language like he moves through his topics, though he stays sharp and pithy. A sentence, however stripped of context it may be, encapsulates a certain comforting wholeness: “The air conditioning would freeze whatever idee fixe was keeping me awake into a solid cube of thought.” Indiana uses these self-reflexive moments to play with genre as well. In “One Size Fits All,” Indiana opens with “This is fiction,” and continues a few pages later with, “Now for another fiction.” Constantly, the author is cheekily aware that he is writing, and this is precisely what keeps the reader hooked: “Whatever it is you are thinking, that’s not what’s going on. Listen: to be alive...to finish this page: if it had all been to forget you, you’d have been forgotten long ago.” But the book climaxes in its novella, Rent Boy, in which Indiana sheds an illuminating light on male escorts and the intricacies of the relationships they build with their clients.
A punchy array of ruminations that perfectly mirrors its title.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9912196-6-7
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Itna Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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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