Not much in the way of knockouts here, but plenty of solid shots.
Ten stories from the legendary Hollywood director: some good, some passable, all worthwhile.
It’s fair to say that Sayles has been known for his independent stance and writing talent as much as anything: in the film world, what has garnered him attention are his words and settings. He’s also a novelist (Los Gusanos, 1991), and now—after 25 years—he brings us a second collection of tales (after The Anarchists’ Convention, 1979). “The Halfway Diner” is a hallmark selection, a tough and poignant portrait of a band of women making the long bus trip across a desert to visit their men in jail. Not much happens—these, for the most part, are stories long on small knots of characters talking, short on action—but it’s an exacting piece of work. The title piece, from 1980, collects the reactions of a number of lower-rung Hollywood employees in a rest home when one of their number, a guy who’d supposedly been a driver on the Fox lot, declares that he used to be John Dillinger. It’s a short little surprise, like a postcard from old Hollywood and quite funny for the often didactic Sayles. The meat of the volume is likely “Casa de los Babys,” a lengthy story from 2000 that was the basis for a film three years later. The setting is phenomenal, a group of American women in a rundown Mexico hotel waiting for the glacially slow bureaucracy to provide them with the children they came down to adopt. A well-nuanced selection of examples of American ignorance, arrogance,and innocence, the women alternate between support and backbiting, each not-so-secretly hoping her baby comes first. As in his films, Sayles proves better over the short stretch, with his punchy dialogue and socially astute ear, while occasionally lacking the story drive to carry him through longer passages.
Not much in the way of knockouts here, but plenty of solid shots.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-56025-632-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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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