Lovingly crafted comedies from a writer beginning to match wit with wisdom.
Eighteen new flights of fancy from preternaturally gifted humorist Rich (Spoiled Brats, 2014, etc.).
Art, ambition, and Hollywood stardust are at the heart of this new comic collection from Rich, just coming off producing three seasons of sitcom Man Seeking Woman, itself based on his own The Last Girlfriend on Earth (2013). Professional jealousy gets a twist in “The Baby,” in which a novelist finds himself competing with his unborn child for literary recognition. The funniest story to read aloud follows in “Riding Solo: The Oatsy Story,” in which Paul Revere’s unsung horse laments his historical obscurity. Making art is literally addictive in “Relapse,” in which a one-hit wonder tries to escape the ugly realities of adulthood. Shades of Christopher Moore’s historical slapstick fall over two stories: “Hands,” about a Christian monk struggling with his own ethical deficits, and “The Great Jester,” a Python-esque medieval farce. There are a few frivolities that might have been better left on the cutting-room floor, including the one-joke “Physician’s Lounge, April 1st,” the simplistic “Tom Hanks Stories,” and the self-flagellating satire “The Book of Simon.” It’s not that Rich can’t be acidic: See “Adolf Hitler: The GQ Profile,” the mordantly funny “Upward Mobility,” or the sheer irony of “Artist’s Revenge.” But he also has a sweet spot between mockery and respect for old Hollywood that most notably appears in “New Client,” in which an old-time talent agent strikes a deal with his last client, and the tartly charming “Stage 13,” about a starlet who finally makes good.
Lovingly crafted comedies from a writer beginning to match wit with wisdom.Pub Date: July 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-46889-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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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