"Look at all this stuff I've got in my head: rockets and Venetian churches, David Bowie and Diderot, nuoc roam and Big Macs, sunglasses and orgasms." With all that stuff in her formidable head—and her essay-ish turn of mind—Sontag's fiction isn't going to be like anyone else's; and it certainly isn't going to be for everyone. But these eight stories, written between 1963 and 1977 for such diverse journals as Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and Playboy, are fascinatingly varied, often delightful in their darkly ironic twists, and only occasionally unworthy of the reader effort required. Paradoxically, the two weakest stories are the easiest and the most difficult. "The Dummy" (1963) is neat—fed-up commuter has himself replaced by a robot with a heart of its own—but Roald Dahl would have done it just as well, without the themes sitting on top. Opaque "Dr. Jekyll" also dances its ideas on our heads—about energy, freedom, evil, karma?—and, despite amusing lines and arresting images, Sontag is outshone by Donald Barthelme at this business of juxtaposing legendary echoes with contemporary banalities. But in the other stories, there's naked pain lurking—deflected, straight to the heart sometimes, by whichever oblique format Sontag is using. "Project for a Trip to China" is wild free association on matters Chinese (multiple-choice questions, lists, gags), yet there's an autobiographical panic running through it, like a rat in a maze. "Baby" is the surreal record of a couple consulting a psychiatrist for help with their mad, bad child—a panorama of parental anxiety that throws out chronological order and leaves the psychiatrist's queries to the imagination. In the recent, feverish "Unguided Tour," the pain (seeing beautiful things abroad doesn't help) is perhaps not deflected quite enough, while the allegorical markings in "American Spirits" may go too far in keeping ironic distance. However, "Debriefing," a gallery of despair, Manhattan-style, successfully mixes autobiographical immediacy with social essaying. And in "Old Complaints Revisited," when a Party member quits, offering a farcically complete catalogue of what it means to belong to the Party, a personal scream comes snaking up out of all that essayistic stuffing. Wiry, allusive, and too smart for their own good—read them anyway.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1978
ISBN: 0312420102
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1978
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
