Sightseeing / Winslow in Love

[February 16th, 2005]

^Sightseeing

By Rattawut Lapcharoensap

(Grove Press, 250 pages, $19.95)

This astonishing collection of short stories by young Thai-American author Rattawut Lapcharoensap broke out with the full weight of critical praise behind it. For once, the hype is deserved. These stories, some of which have seen print in Granta and Portland's own Glimmer Train, go far beyond the usual settings of cross-cultural alienation to reveal unforgettable characters, relationships and events so perfectly vivid and detailed that it's sometimes hard to believe that this is fiction and not memoir.

With ease and grace, the Chicago-born, Bangkok-raised Lapcharoensap brings us broad humor, gut-aching pathos and the elusive area in between.

"Don't Let Me Die in This Place" is narrated by the ultimate crotchety old man, who has moved to Thailand to live with his unsentimental son, his Thai daughter-in-law and their "mongrel children," bitterly complaining all the way. "Farangs" is guaranteed to make anyone who has been an American tourist in Thailand blush and hang her head in shame, while reflexively laughing at the depiction.

The final story in the collection, "Cockfighting," superbly anchors the book and takes Lapcharoensap's talent to a new height. The tale is told in the perfectly convincing voice of a 15-year-old girl, who watches, not quite helplessly, as the vicious crime, desperation and corruption of her hometown systematically destroy the already fragile peace of her family life, showing her that no one is quite who she has always assumed he was. "Cockfighting" has more satisfying weight and flavor than novels 10 times its length. Jemiah Jefferson

^Winslow in Love

By Kevin Canty

(Nan A. Talese, 254 pages, $23.95)

Woe to the professor who wakes up middle-aged with a student lying next to him, for he will later pay for this transgression. Yet some go ahead anyway, men like Richard Winslow, the falling-down house of a failed poet at the center of Kevin Canty's new novel.

Winslow rolls into Missoula, Mont., for a teaching gig blocked, bloated, and peppered with melanomas. Amazingly, he manages to meet a young woman as bad off as he. What follows reads like the closest equivalent to a Tom Waits song one can find between covers.

Winslow turns a life preserver— his job in Missoula—into an albatross. His graduate students don't know what to make of their misanthropic teacher. All of them except Erika, a skinny waif so riddled with piercings "she looked like a change purse jangling."

When Winslow retires to his office to nurse his self-pity with Johnnie Walker, Erika follows. She matches him drink for drink, issue for issue, and like a man falling for his own demise, Winslow feels the first stirrings of desire.

This isn't Canty's first bitter valentine to self-destruction. But whereas the cast of his 1999 novel, Nine Below Zero, had every reason to earn our sympathy—and didn't—the misfits here have a host of reasons not to, but do. In part it's because Canty has whipped his prose into just the right tone: two parts gravel-voiced realism, one part hoped-for redemption.

Running on the fumes of his unachieved ambitions, Winslow discovers he has nothing to lose in putting all his chips down on a crazy coed. We know it will end badly. Yet I dare you to look away. John Freeman