A spare, bleak saga of two generations in the life of a Guyanese family struggling for respectability but unable to snatch any but the most fleeting moments of happiness. In the Heat of the Day (1993), the first of the novels and the only one previously published in the US, traces the declining fortunes of Sonny Armstrong and his wife, Gladys, as their quarrels with relatives, servants, and each other leave them sunk in a domestic hell worthy of a household Dante. One Generation follows their son Rohan, whose secure position in the civil service offers a promise of rescue from his parents' misery, but whose love for Indrani Mohammed, intensified by his fearful desire for his older sister Genetha, leads him to follow Indrani to a backwater village where he falls in love with Indrani's younger sister Dada even as Indrani's husband's family determines to get rid of him. Following Rohan's death—a mystery the police never solve—the focus shifts, in Genetha, to the last of the Armstrongs, who finds that every choice open to her—the genteel suitor Michael or her brother's forbidden friend Fingers, life with the domineering aunts her father had antagonized or in the brothel run by the former servant he had slept with—is equally poisoned. Genetha's one idyllic episode—a trip to Morawhanna with Fingers and her neighbor Ulric- -ends when she discovers on her return that Fingers has sold her house out from under her. ``The individual is nothing. The family's everything,'' concludes Genetha's aunt Deborah, whose own thirst for retribution explains why her remark is such an ironically apt epigraph for the whole trilogy. Like the early D.H. Lawrence, Heath endows the familiar trials of this family with an elemental power, as if each were happening for the first time. The result is harrowing in its simplicity and cumulative force.
Pub Date: April 14, 1994
ISBN: 0-89255-199-2
Page Count: 652
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
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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