Hey, Etgar, don't give up the day job.
A bestselling Israeli author and TV comedy writer draws from previous story collections to introduce himself to an American readership
It isn't hard to see why a US publisher might think there would be a market for Keret’s fiction here: The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God is a veritable compilation of fashionable bad-writing tricks, with a level of humor that suggests Israeli sitcoms are not appreciably more clever than their American counterparts. The author uses a vaguely punk minimalist style, drawing tediously on “like,” “you know,” and by-now-stale scatology to mimic the voice of young urban anomie, but Keret can't hide a depressingly conventional sentimentality (or a certain smarmy misogyny) behind the fake toughness of his prose. The stories are mostly constructed around facile ironies and comedy clichés. “Rabin's Death” tells of a street fight precipitated by the fact that the narrator's cat, run over by a motorcyclist, is named for the late Israeli prime minister. The title piece is about a loser whose life is changed for the worse when the bus driver in question commits a unique act of charity. The protagonist of “Missing Kissinger” is torn between his demanding girlfriend and his overbearing Jewish mother, each of whom expects him to cut out the other’s heart. Even the novella, “Kneller's Happy Campers,” the only substantial work here as well as the only new one, is fairly threadbare: a first-person tale of the special afterlife reserved for suicides, said afterlife bearing a depressing resemblance to the hellish real-life world of suburbia. All of these pieces are rendered with a tiresome flatness that even the skilled translators cannot resuscitate.
Hey, Etgar, don't give up the day job.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26188-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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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