An infuriatingly uneven second collection (after The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, 1995) whose chaotic feel and...
Bizarre content and rhetorical overkill are the salient features of this oddball gathering of 13 short fictions (some aren’t precisely stories), by the young author of Purple America (1997) and The Ice Storm (1994), among others.
Moody’s characters are casualties of various culture and gender wars, whose private battles are recounted in bursts of staccato sentence fragments ripe with the effluvia of psychic dislocation and sexual dysfunction, danced to a heavy thrum of rock music–backed antic despair. Scarcely developed premises mar several stories (“Hawaiian Night,” “Drawer,” “Boys”) that aren’t much more than, well, moody prose poems. Vagrant forms are employed by “Pan’s Fair Throng,” a faux (and rather arch) fantasy written to accompany a painter-friend’s exhibit; “Wilkie Ridgeway Fahnstock, The Boxed Set,” in which liner notes for an audiocassette package reveal the farcically wasted life of a poor little rich boy undone by “his countercultural personal habits”; and “Surplus Value Books: Catalogue Number 13,” an annotated listing whose contents amusingly express the truculent daydreams and hang-ups of a sardonic woman book dealer (one longs for a glimpse at that cookbook reputedly authored by J.D. Salinger). “The Double Zero” reimagines Sherwood Anderson’s classic tale of failed midwestern enterprise (“The Egg”); and the kindred spirits, if not influences of, T. Coraghessan Boyle and Rick De Marinis are observable in distaff portrayals of a feisty woman fed up with her smug Lacanian-intellectual lover (“Ineluctable Modality of the Vaginal”) and a minor L.A. actress (who specializes in “well-paying but shallow roles in commercials”) caught up in teen-gang crossfire at a local McDonald’s (“Carousel”). Authentic emotion replaces arbitrary weirdness only in the opening and closing pieces, tragicomic farces spun from their possible deeply personal animating ideas: the death of a beloved sister, and how best to appropriately memorialize and honor it.
An infuriatingly uneven second collection (after The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, 1995) whose chaotic feel and flow prove both seductive and alienating. Moody marches on, to the beat of a drummer so different many readers may be unable to hear it at all.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2000
ISBN: 0-316-58874-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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