A vast catalog of history, sadness, and love.
Prose as jam-packed as early Pynchon nicely litters a novella and five stories following Griffith’s promising first novel (Spikes, 2001).
Range and research are on display here. The title novella follows Myrtle, once a hottie but now a governess-type, and Seti, an awkward Egyptian national, through their adventures working in a university library overrun by rutting students finding love and adventure within the stacks. This is only semifuturistic allegory, to be sure, as “So much of education consists in learning how foolish people used to be, when they lived in chaos and error.” But what will happen when Seti tells Myrtle her “coals remain hot”? Will the two discover the true root of rock ’n’ roll? After all, isn’t the history of literature a library of double entendre and intercourse? Or should this odd couple give up on even the inferior form of love they’re capable of and settle for coarse pun? The rest of the stories are just as well-planned and zany: in “Zugzwang” (a chess term), an ex-professional wrestler-father and a boardgame-prodigy son find themselves growing apart when the latter employs the former in a living chess display that turns into farcical spectacle. A man whose science is hair finds himself contemplating desperate acts (“The Trichologist’s Rug”) as his wife manages to remain miraculously young. And “Junior’s—We Cap Hubs” is a portrait of a night-watchman in a New Jersey where the “Whores [have] complexions like Spam, legs like overstuffed duffels. Newark’s pastries had fillings the color and consistency of spunk . . . . ” The situations touched on here are every bit as broad as the geography they span. If Griffith is guilty of anything, it’s overindulgence in research and a habit of including everything. But beneath all the banter are real lives and people, forging identities in a modernity that’s trying to outpace them.
A vast catalog of history, sadness, and love.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-55970-676-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
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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