Misfires orbiting a worthwhile theme.
Twelve stories from poet and memoirest Rodriguez (Always Running, 1993, etc.) paint a disturbing portrait of East Los Angeles, but fail to populate it with characters who transcend the political sensibility they seem to emerge from.
In “My Ride, My Revolution,” a limo driver crosses back and forth over the line between rich and poor while reading the Bible and Stephen King in his spare time; “Shadows” is an unformed depiction of the horror of alcoholism in a Hispanic family; the tough life of gang girls begins “Las Chicas Chuecas,” but we quickly sneak behind the facade to witness the fragile lives of innocents; “Boom, Bot, Boom” reveals the adventures of an ex-con trying to right his life; “Mechanics” is a clumsy tale of love, labor and loss; “Oiga” offers a Mexican-Indian woman’s bleak meditation on the love and life she’s capable of; and “Miss East L.A.” is a miniature mystery about a young man who wants to be a scribe finding himself conveniently given a job as a feature writer on the trail of a local murder. Rodriguez is skillful at rendering the aura of East LA, but too often shoots for a kind of scope that he has yet to master. In the scenes and exchanges that want to be the heart of the collection, there’s a failure of execution: the people never quite become characters, and the stories fall short of the literary. The only previously published piece (“Sometimes You Dance With a Watermelon”) has appeared widely, as both fiction and nonfiction, but despite its effort to assign nobility to difficult lives, its own political will more clearly formed than the characters it tries to defend. One wishes Rodriguez step back and look again at these lives, from the distance where East LA appears like a “skid row of lost dreams and spent realities, of fury—this is a riot town, after all—and acid rain.”
Misfires orbiting a worthwhile theme.Pub Date: April 9, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-621263-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Rayo/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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