A debut collection from rising star Moody (The Ice Storm, 1994; Garden State, 1992), who, here, throws together a wild, perverse, and ultimately flat mosaic of contemporary life. The diverse characters who inhabit Moody's landscape seem to have little in common apart from remarkably similar delusions of grandeur. We're shown, in the first of ten stories (``The Preliminary Notes''), the unhappy marriage of a shyster lawyer who spies obsessively on his wife as part of some unexplained scheme to ``fix her ass in court.'' A long and rambling fantasy about James Dean's association with an early '60s rock group serves as the unconvincing pretext behind ``The James Dean Garage Band,'' whereas ``Treatment'' is precisely thatan East Village filmmaker's overwrought cinematic treatment of his own very slack daily routines (``we have been sitting at this table seems like ten minutes but on screen much abbreviated not a word between us Dee the sex goddess awkward and bored and me mute uncertain studying the menu and its arcane Moroccan specials couscous couscous couscous to delay the moment what the fuck are we going to talk about...''). The centerpiece, however, is the title novella, 75- pager (first published in the Paris Review) that follows the fall of three junkies of the Reagan era in a perfect deadpan voice that hints at neither sympathy, judgment, nor comprehension: ``He was from Massapequa, Long Island, and rock and roll had transformed him from a guy from Massapequa into a person with charm....And the son, the son of this wealthy broker, was shooting dope and living in some rundown East Village apartment with nothing in it but a futon and a CD player. This kind of life gave the band with no name a lot of credibility.'' It's all vivid and well-drawn, but the obscurity of the narrator's own attitude toward his subjects turns the work into a prolonged immersion in squalor. Pointless, unfocused, and needlessly sordid overall.
Pub Date: Aug. 23, 1995
ISBN: 0-316-57929-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
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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