A keen-eyed depiction of the rock netherworld’s denizens is sabotaged by too many over-the-top scenarios.
A practiced observer offers frantic fictions of rock ’n’ roll madness.
Simmons has been plying her trade as a music journalist since the ’70s, in Mojo, Rolling Stone, Q, and a host of British dailies and weeklies and has penned biographies of the off-center pop figures Serge Gainsbourg and Neil Young. Here, however, she turns her hand to that most difficult form: rock fiction. The format is a loosely interlocking collection of stories featuring a handful of recurring characters: megalomaniac metal star Frame, oft-married country luminary LeeAnn Starmountain, Jim Morrison tribute performer Reeve, addled punk-pop vocalist Pussy, and damaged classic-rock songwriter Cal West. Some of the characters are familiar types, others veiled simulacra of real performers (Pussy is Debbie Harry, Cal West is Brian Wilson, etc.). These figures and others are involved in 18 tales set in a musical cosmos that is, as one character puts it, “like one of those parallel universes they had in the old sci-fi comics, where things look the same but have completely different functions.” In this domain, a cult devoted to the late Karen Carpenter springs up, a televised séance to raise a dead music legend is held on an LA beach, and a rocker urinates on his fans off a hotel balcony. Inevitably, stalkers stalk, groupies grope, and superstars suffer colossal breakdowns. Simmons has all the details of record-company politicking, rock-biz noblesse oblige, and backstage ritual down pat. But her plots suffer from the same excess that plagues so many works set in the milieu. Since everything in rock is drawn in larger-than-life proportions, fiction writers feel they must push the envelope and stoke the outrageous at every turn. In the case of Simmons, when she goes in for affecting character studies, the pieces work brilliantly, but she pushes most of the action in preposterous directions, often to the point of burlesque.
A keen-eyed depiction of the rock netherworld’s denizens is sabotaged by too many over-the-top scenarios.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8021-4156-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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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