The author plainly knows and loves his city well and deserves a readership beyond his regional renown.
The neighborhoods and nightlife of New Orleans provide vivid details in these stories of a city unlike any other.
Though Hurricane Katrina provides a line of demarcation in this collection, native son Nolan (Higher Ground, 2011, etc.) knows that folks have been leaving the city and lamenting the disappearance of its past (or else wallowing in it) since well before the climactic disaster. “[I]t’s a great place to be from. And a great place to come back to, once in a while,” explains the protagonist of “Le Vie En Rose Construction Co.,” one of the older “selected” stories and perhaps the best here. He continues, “The creative possibilities here seemed endless. And so did the destructive.” The destructive dominates the creative in these stories, though they are slapstick as often as tragic (and sometimes both, in a way specific to the city). Though the subtitle isn’t as specific as it could be, the book has two sections: The first offers 10 new stories followed by 10 taken from Perpetual Care (2008). Black or white, gay or straight, male or female, young or (often) old, the characters exist in what the author sees as a world unto itself, one that those who leave can never really escape and those who return have trouble recognizing as home. In “Hard Freeze,” a virtuoso pianist with a French mother and an African-American father returns to the city to make peace with his late father and discovers deep roots he never knew he had: “Here in New Orleans, with its French history and African blood lines, where he had long dreamed he would melt in like chocolate, he felt particularly foreign,” though he later realizes how much of the city is within him. There are stories of sexual predators and innocent prey, of rich fathers and the sons who have disappointed them, of elderly residents who have seen their city disappear and who often become lost in memories.
The author plainly knows and loves his city well and deserves a readership beyond his regional renown.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-935754-34-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Univ. of Louisiana at Lafayette
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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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