Like being regaled by an eccentric Joyce devotee: a reader feels both exhilarated and trapped.
McCourt brings back the eponymous movie star protagonist of Kaye Wayfaring (Avenged, 1984) and her opera diva mother-in-law (Mawdrew Czgowchwz, 1975) in a tour de force of language that will delight some while leaving others frustrated by the submerged characters, plot, and sheer difficulty of the read.
The seven linked pyrotechnic fictions—none with the shape or structure of a traditional story—are organized around three conceits: to stand as representations of the Seven Deadly Sins; to make parallels between Hollywood mythology and other—notably Irish—mythologies; and to record Wayfaring’s life from 1984, when she fails to get an Oscar nomination for Avenged, to the day about a decade later when she is expected to receive the award for a film based on her disturbed (and disturbing) mother’s life and suicide in Georgia. Along the way, she stars in a film shot in Ireland that has roles for her young twins and Czgowchwz; she’s a hit in the rock band her husband Tristan—years her junior—formed with his twin; she has memories of Norma Jean/Marilyn and is horrified by exploitation of the dead star; her son (also Tristan, also founder of a rock band) comes out, painfully, as gay, journeys cross-country and nearly dies of an overdose. The narrative emerges through gossip, letters, speechifying, speculating, pontificating, and storytelling, with jumps from one character to another, shifts in time and place, and dialogue often unattributed. McCourt has fun with specialized jargon—semiotics, Freud, anthropology, astrology, video games, and more—especially in unexpected contexts. Characters never stoop to plain speech. (“How much more satisfactory . . . is immersion in the study of long barrow, curses, avenue, and row—providing evidence of artificial horizons for crosswise viewing from both sides of a single mound—read bicoastal life—and lengthwise viewing directed over a contrescarpe burial chamber, extending cosmic symbolism into the realm of personal liturgy: read one’s career.”)
Like being regaled by an eccentric Joyce devotee: a reader feels both exhilarated and trapped.Pub Date: July 9, 2002
ISBN: 0-394-52362-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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
© Copyright 2025 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.
