Self's celebrated perversity (My Idea of Fun, 1994, etc.) largely goes on holiday in this second collection (after The Quantity Theory of Insanity, 1995). This time, nine stories (four of them previously published) remain close in theme to earlier work while falling well short of Self's mastery of the blackly comic. The first piece, ``Between the Conceits''—in which one of the only eight real people in London describes the rules of a game involving incessant manipulations of his ``people'' to gain advantage over his competitors—most closely approximates Self's knack for imagining a freakish society with disturbing echoes of the real one. Similarly, ``Chest'' conjures up a nightmarish England whose inhabitants are sickened by a constant, choking smog that leaves them dependent on inhalers and at risk of death if they tarry outside. Otherwise, these tales range from complete misses to insubstantial set pieces clustered around a single riveting detail. In ``Incubus,'' an intricately carved, magnificently phallic screen from the 17th century adorns an otherwise nondescript house (and story), casting a lusty spell on an aging philosophy professor and his adoring graduate student; in ``Inclusion,'' a psychoactive drug prepared from the corpses and fecal matter of bee mites is given a clandestine trial by a pharmaceutical company, with results that are disastrous but unremarkable; and in ``The End of the Relationship,'' the volume's raw but lifeless finale, a woman's despair over a rift with her boyfriend propels her into a series of encounters with couples at odds with each other. Evidence of a savage talent still exists in this mÇlange, but the mesmerizing quality of Self's earlier sordid, in-your-face images is too often absent—while what remains is pedestrian, if not downright dull. (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-87113-620-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
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
Told through the points of view of the four Garcia sisters- Carla, Sandi, Yolanda and Sofia-this perceptive first novel by poet Alvarez tells of a wealthy family exiled from the Dominican Republic after a failed coup, and how the daughters come of age, weathering the cultural and class transitions from privileged Dominicans to New York Hispanic immigrants. Brought up under strict social mores, the move to the States provides the girls a welcome escape from the pampered, overbearingly protective society in which they were raised, although subjecting them to other types of discrimination. Each rises to the challenge in her own way, as do their parents, Mami (Laura) and Papi (Carlos). The novel unfolds back through time, a complete picture accruing gradually as a series of stories recounts various incidents, beginning with ``Antojos'' (roughly translated ``cravings''), about Yolanda's return to the island after an absence of five years. Against the advice of her relatives, who fear for the safety of a young woman traveling the countryside alone, Yolanda heads out in a borrowed car in pursuit of some guavas and returns with a renewed understanding of stringent class differences. ``The Kiss,'' one of Sofia's stories, tells how she, married against her father's wishes, tries to keep family ties open by visiting yearly on her father's birthday with her young son. And in ``Trespass,'' Carla finds herself the victim of ignorance and prejudice a year after the Garcias have arrived in America, culminating with a pervert trying to lure her into his car. In perhaps one of the most deft and magical stories, ``Still Lives,'' young Sandi has an extraordinary first art lesson and becomes the inspiration for a statue of the Virgin: ``Dona Charito took the lot of us native children in hand Saturday mornings nine to twelve to put Art into us like Jesus into the heathen.'' The tradition and safety of the Old World are just part of the tradeoff that comes with the freedom and choice in the New. Alvarez manages to bring to attention many of the issues-serious and light-that immigrant families face, portraying them with sensitivity and, at times, an enjoyable, mischievous sense.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-945575-57-2
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
PROFILES
APPRECIATIONS
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