A distractingly entertaining second collection, nimbly executed.
Weird boyfriends, bad novels, sexually perverse collegiates.
Almond, author of the collection My Life in Heavy Metal (2002) and the nonfiction Candyfreak (2003), has a nice treasure trove of ideas and a smart way with his characters, but he always seems to lose interest just as the going gets good. The title story is a good example. Here, an editor at a women’s magazine starts a relationship with an odd, short little doctor whom she’s powerfully attracted to despite his childlike tendencies and bedroom ineptitude. The affair goes seriously sour when she meets Chow’s ex and uncovers some secrets; but Almond had an interesting start here, slyly inverting the chick-lit setup with the narrator’s caustic and unsentimental running commentary. It’s too bad he truncates it. Sex is a constant theme, especially in the funny, lascivious teacher-gone-errant “Appropriate Sex” (“This was a Friday in April, one of the last days of the term, and the undergrads were all worked up”). What happens (neurotically slutty student comes on hard to her writing professor, who ends up just sharing a joint with one of the dimmer bulbs in the class) is less important than Almond’s sarcastic limning of the none-too-impressive undergrads the teacher is forced to endure. The masterpiece is “Larsen’s Novel,” about a man with an impossibly pushy best friend, Larsen, who agrees to read that friend’s novel, a 600-page pile of execrable cliché, soon regretting his decision (another reader: “Surely [it was] a labor of love . . . So, too, was the Third Reich”). Almond strains for source material at times—see the lazy bull session that makes up “The Idea of Michael Jackson’s Dick”—and may not include much of great consequence, but the effortless humor throughout compensates for a lot.
A distractingly entertaining second collection, nimbly executed.Pub Date: April 22, 2005
ISBN: 1-56512-422-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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