The characters are more shallow than the hot tubs they inhabit.
Short stories whose two main themes are announced in the title.
McCauley (Need: Stories from Africa, 2004, etc.) populates his affluent, quasi-Cheeveresque world with successful professional men and women who have too much time and not enough soul, and they could hardly screw up their lives more if they had personal assistants of chaos. They drive Volvos. They rail against their unsuccessful children. They suspect one another of infidelity, usually with ample reason. Marty grows marijuana in his basement. “It’s not a grow farm,” he insists, explaining his sticky situation to his lawyer, but the discovery of his 20-year tradition of supplying pot to family and friends leads to the threat of job loss and house foreclosure. Susan and George consummate an adulterous affair solely to get revenge on their own unfaithful spouses. Wilbert suspects Sandra of having an affair because every week she “sneaks off” to a Wednesday Bible study at a local church. We learn that Wilbert, with unconscious irony, “[accepts] the equality of men and women in all respects—except, of course, in abilities and roles.” Ben sends his wife Alice flowers and signs the card, “from a very ardent admirer,” and she’s disappointed to find out their prosaic source. A number of characters enjoy getting into grotesquely embarrassing conversations and cynically keep them going just to see what’s going to happen. While the stories are not exactly interlocked, and characters don’t, in Yoknapatawpha fashion, reappear from one story to another, the world they inhabit seems to be a common space. One recurrent setting is the “hot tub” of the title. Seemingly as an inside joke, McCauley inserts allusions to or scenes with hot tubs into almost every story. When Shree tells a sexually overheated Morgan, “God, I want to do a tub right now,” she unwittingly announces a major motif of the collection.
The characters are more shallow than the hot tubs they inhabit.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-57962-154-4
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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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