The undertow of these dark and seductive tales is irresistible.
Debut collection set in a paradise forever lost to the privileged elite who, in their search for love and retribution, despoil Hawaii’s exotic beauty and indigenous culture.
With a cool, precise narrative voice, Hemmings eviscerates a tropical country-club society populated by fatuous patriarchs, disengaged mothers and bitter kids. What distinguishes these tales of the filthy rich at play is their way of showing the ease and seeming lack of consequence with which lives are ruined and hope lost. The author’s eye for damning detail is unflinching. A girl of ten intentionally swims with and gets stung by a flotilla of Portuguese men-of-war so she will have a story worth whispering into the ear of her unapproachable mother, who lies in a coma, now literally out of reach, after being thrown from a lover’s speedboat; a runaway older brother persuades his sister to help him strip their parents’ plush home (including a marble fireplace), then strands her on the wild North Shore. Incestuous impulses rumble through the nine stories like molten rock on the move, seismic warnings that go unheeded: an uncle makes out with his teenage niece while high on the magic mushrooms she introduced him to; a mother who has sacrificed her own happiness in order to preserve her missionary-family’s plantation becomes jealous of her son’s burgeoning sexuality; a boy lusts after his nanny. It’s a world of lavish second weddings attended by drunken exes and cagey stepsiblings calculating how to divvy up not enough love as it is. As adept with the flora and fauna of her native landscape as she is with the animal kingdom’s most dangerous predator, Hemmings creates an unstable ecosystem on the verge of collapse; the adults believe that they’re happy and that the children can fend for themselves in the lush land, but, in truth, everyone is at sea, where sharks circle and riptides reign.
The undertow of these dark and seductive tales is irresistible.Pub Date: June 16, 2005
ISBN: 1-59420-048-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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