Roper (The Trespassers, 1992, etc.) presents a novel-in- stories—set in California and ranging from the 60's to the 90's- -made up of mostly touching takes on the lonely fates of mind- damaged hippies and wayfarers. Protagonist Abel Richards—once a sort of wild man—is now divorced and living in Cuervo, California, a town of some 400 people that's ``always been a place to escape to.'' It was also, briefly, a mecca for beats, hippies, and drug-addled seekers. Here, Richards chronicles their tales and works out his own fate. Some of the untitled chapters are sketchy, others rambling sagas, but generally the interconnectedness of the stories saves them from drowning in their own ennui. Early on, wife Jackie leaves Richards for a screenwriter, and daughter Margaret is caught in the middle when Jackie turns from a boisterous married earth-mother into a ``cadaverous figure,'' an alcoholic cokehead. Richards, staying in the old family homestead, quarrels with younger brother Joel when he returns bedraggled from years in Hawaii and recollects the downfalls of Martin Declan—once a mentor in the marijuana trade but now a sort of hermit who gets shot in the back with a bow-and- arrow before disappearing—and brother-in law Terry, who lived with Abel and Jackie for years before traveling and turning into a junkie. The last couple of pieces concern Richards's return to Europe, where he meets a son from a long-ago fling, gets reinvolved with the boy's mother, and then corresponds via long journal entries with the boy once the mother dies. The book, that is, ends with the possibility of redemption and contact. Though shapeless, this does capture—as if in amber—both the romantic, addle-brained Sixties and its deadly psychic hangovers.
Pub Date: July 22, 1993
ISBN: 0-89919-988-7
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
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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