Compulsively readable, if limited in scope: stories that bode well for a young O. Henry–winner with talent to burn.
Debut collection from a young author who specializes in the meltdown of middle-class masculinity.
All these stories concern young men around the age of marriageability: fumbling, confused guys who can’t understand why life isn't giving them what they want. The title piece, one of the best here, is a slacker rewrite of Death in Venice in which we watch Sam, an alienated advertising drone, slowly debase himself before the beautiful boy with whom (unbeknownst to himself) he’s fallen in love. The remaining stories are resolutely straight-acting, with praise of the female posterior serving as a major motif. The heroes resemble each other so closely that, although Sam the Cat confesses to having an ex- girlfriend who used to wet the bed when drunk, it is Vince, in “Not This,” who gets teased for it. “Issues I Dealt with in Therapy” traces the narrator's increasingly hollow friendship with a hard-driving young politico, culminating in a mean-spirited, drunken wedding toast that is one of this often wry collection's few laugh-out-loud moments. Klam excels at reproducing the voices of entitled, self-loathing jerks, but when he strays from boy-at-the crossroads territory, the results are mixed. “European Wedding,` the only story written in the third person and the only one attempting multiple points of view, is by far the least successful. As Klam chronicles the misadventures of a hapless groom-to-be stranded in a French chateau with a near-exclusively feminine wedding party (the bride's name is Gynnie: get it?), the book's general tone of good-natured horniness shades into misogyny.
Compulsively readable, if limited in scope: stories that bode well for a young O. Henry–winner with talent to burn.Pub Date: May 19, 2000
ISBN: 0-679-45745-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
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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