For ultra-committed fans and Vonnegut scholars only.
Early, unpublished work from the much-lauded and much-loved American writer.
The foreword by his friend Sidney Offit portrays Vonnegut (1922–2007) as being in his private life very much like the man we know from his fiction: a gimlet-eyed, cantankerous, but always openhearted observer of the human condition. Readers will discover traces of that Vonnegut here. In “Shout About It from the Housetops,” a traveling salesman who finds himself in the middle of an embattled couple’s marital drama thinks, “I was sure now that both the husband and wife were crazy, and that, if there were any children, the children would be crazy as bedbugs, too. There obviously wasn’t anybody around who could be counted on to make regular payments on storm windows.” These words capture both the character and the callous earnestness of a low-level capitalist. It’s also clear that Vonnegut’s gift for believably absurd monikers emerged early; anyone who admires the singular genius of the name Kilgore Trout will likely appreciate Fuzz Littler and K. Hollomon Weems. But despite the occasional flickers of brilliance, the collection as a whole is not very good. Offit mentions O. Henry in his foreword, but The Twilight Zone would be a more apt comparison; the stories’ unvarying structure—setup followed by shocking twist—is strikingly similar to that of the TV show. Though obviously of value to anyone interested in Vonnegut’s artistic development, this edition suffers from a lack of context. The pieces are not dated, nor are we told whether they went unpublished because they were rejected or because the author was dissatisfied with them.
For ultra-committed fans and Vonnegut scholars only.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-34371-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
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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