If you share “a belief in the hopefulness of sexuality,” this astonishing collection of some of the worst writing on the current scene, all of it about condoms, may be the book for you. A badly mismatched collection of 29 stories, poems, essays, and excerpts from famous books you—ve probably already read, it exhibits all of the narcissism, vapidity, and plain old ignorance that immediately spring to mind nowadays at the mere mention of “creative writing.” There are, first of all, the retreads (some of them pretty good) taken from works like T.C. Boyle’s “Modern Love” (a typical Boyleian fantasy involving a hypochondriacal girlfriend and a “full-body condom—); Armistead Maupin’s “Campmates” (about gay men “discovering” condoms in the early 1980s); John Irving’s teenaged sex scene from The World According to Garp; Martin Amis’s sexual reminiscences from The Rachel Papers; and Anne Rice’s very unsafe vampire sex from The Tale of the Body Thief. Then there are the poems, many of them silly or pretentious (—a Houdini risking / his life time and again / inside an airtight skin—). But the real discoveries are to be found in the “new” section, which includes such treats as Kim Addonizio’s “A Brief History of Condoms” (a pseudo-spoofing of academic prose); Cynthia Baughman’s “Safety Speech” (Cambridge graduate students examine the sexual politics of movie voice-overs); and Cathryn Alpert’s “Condomology in Twelve Easy Lessons” (a sort of top-twelve list of condom embarrassments). Nathan Englander’s “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,” describing an Orthodox Jew who seeks outs prostitutes during his wife’s “unclean” periods, is one of the few stories of any interest. Pompous and/or foolish; about as pleasant and sensitive as—well, take a guess.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-56947-145-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
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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