Spare and occasionally funny takes from a writer who hasn’t yet found her voice.
A gaggle of New York guys and gals hunt for love and meaning in debut stories that occasionally tickle the fancy but leave little flavor.
Grodstein has an easy way with the pen but a more difficult time making impact in a collection that aspires to a higher class of wit than it attains. “Lonely Planet” helps set the tone. The deluded narrator, Julie, tells about the night she ran over to a bar to console her friend Allan after he broke with his girlfriend Dorie. The evening ends with the two back at his place while Julie does everything possible to seduce the soused Allan, going so far as to find the ring he’d meant for Dorie, putting it on, and spinning elaborate fantasies about their life together. That is, until Allan wakes up and sees her with the ring on. “Hey Beautiful” is a little fillip about an insecure girl’s night out with two of her (she thinks) more attractive friends. Grodstein knows how to set the scene—or at least how to throw in enough New York sights and sounds to give the stories a hint of weight—but her characters’ relentless shallowness quickly gets tiring. Surprisingly, the stories with male protagonists fare better. “John on the Train: A Fable for Cynical Friends” is a more digestible piece about said John, recently relocated from the Midwest, who lives in Queens and works at a men’s magazine in Manhattan. While the author’s cluelessness about his background occasionally comes to light—he “called old friends from the heartland to see how things went on the farm or at the auto dealer or with the new baby”—its story of John’s lonely crush on a girl who rides the same train into Manhattan has an earnest quality mostly lacking from the other pieces.
Spare and occasionally funny takes from a writer who hasn’t yet found her voice.Pub Date: June 25, 2002
ISBN: 0-89255-281-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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
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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