“Try not to be cruel.” “I loved Eyes Wide Shut.”
If this were a movie written by Raphael, the climactic dialogue might sound like this:
“How could it happen?” “Look, he’s fabulous and swings both ways, novels and screenplays. But slack moments happen in his films too. Look at that final scene between Sidney Pollack and Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut. The air shoots right out of the movie. Too much talk.” “And you’re saying?” “This novella, All His Sons. Too many notes, Mozart. I kept falling asleep. Too many pages of deaf Raphael, not like his Coast to Coast (1999). Bundles of facts with no suspense.” “Not all of it.” “Of course not. It springs to life for long stretches. And passages rise up in dancing screenplay format. Then we get buried in talk again. I had to read the first ten pages twice to get all the characters straight. Two brothers, Stanley and Sidney. Stanley’s a professor who teaches film. Sidney produces films. They’re sons of a retired garment maker. Or are they? What about the black man their father treats like a son?” “This strives for satire on film deconstructionists?” “Yeah, but it’s not too funny. And the final scene with the brothers trying to get a grip on their origins. I felt him making it up as he went along.” “Well, how about the nine stories?” “Hopeful little firecrackers that hiss and pop but never explode. Most written for BBC Radio. Even here detail jams up. Most tell of greedy film folk and are not meant to change your life. Most will be lost on future readers and require more footnotes than Dante.” “Which did you like best?” “The last, ‘Son of Enoch,’ which told of a Somerset Maugham–like figure who wants to (not) write a career-capping phantom novel like Capote’s Answered Prayers. The style’s too smart by half—but that’s the point, the forked tongue of literary folk.”
“Try not to be cruel.” “I loved Eyes Wide Shut.”Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-945774-49-4
Page Count: 187
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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