Pretentious, cold and exhausting.
A trio of stubbornly relentless fictions on sex and death and infidelity and sex and death and infidelity. Also: sex, death and infidelity.
Experimentalist Steiner (Negative Space, 2010, etc.) clearly intends this book to function as a triptych on romantic abandonment. The opener, Into the Green Ocean Deep, tracks a woman at death’s door who’s pursuing one last gasp of sexual abandon with her lover. The prose is marked by its gynecological and scatological candor and a repetitive style that might tire Gertrude Stein. (“[S]he isn’t only dying, she’s at the end of dying, and then she’s dead and there isn’t any more dying to do…”—and so on.) Inviolate follows the musings of a woman whose husband lies comatose after a fall from a balcony; what she mainly ponders is the nature of consciousness and her affairs but more repetitively than with depth. The closing Negative Space is a man’s account of his wife’s confession of an affair after 20 years of marriage. This last story benefits from the intimacy of a first-person narrator and a sense of detail (a beloved coat, cigarettes, Parisian streets) that makes its pseudo-philosophical intonations feel less wooly. Steiner knows what he’s doing, and he’s in firm command of his style, but his assurance doesn’t make these stories any less tedious and distancing; the namelessness of the couples don’t signify universality so much as a faraway ghostliness. The book is orthographically punishing as well: Paragraph breaks are rare, making every page feel like a gray-prose tombstone. If Steiner means to explore the fragile nature of our lives, let alone the flickers of love we get to enjoy within them, he’s done it with a dispiriting lack of humor and empathy.
Pretentious, cold and exhausting.Pub Date: March 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61902-231-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
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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