Frustrated Young Men

juvenile but has potential:
I found O'Brien's first collection to be a bit juvenile--a lot like what you would find in a creative writing workshop. Okay, but not something you'd expect to see in book form. But I think O'Brien has a lot of potential to develop as a writer. He has some talent, now he needs to perfect his craft. Which is one of the things publishing in magazines and journals does, lets you know if your work is up to the 'standards' of being published. But on to the book. One of the negatives of this book were the 'interviews' which felt like fillers, as if he had to reach a certain page count and this was his 'cute' way of filling in the missing pages (and please, don't patronize us with a not at the end, those who didn't realize it was fiction probably shouldn't be allowed to read grown up books). "The Writer" which is the opening story had some potential, but in the end fell flat. O'Brien seems to have been trying to write some sort of parable but it didn't pull itself together at all. I'll admit "How About This" and "Indian Summer" I didn't even finish reading. They were that bad. That isn't to say that there weren't some positives because there were. "How to Survive New England Weather" is workshop fiction but it is good workshop fiction. And I fully didn't expect to like "Existential Dilemma" at all, but it turned out to be rather interesting. But on to the true gems of this collection. "Dinner With Caitlin McRay" is a charming story about a friendship with a woman with bulemia. And "Toby Grey" is the best story in the collection. It's a teen angst/coming of age story that I have little bad to say about. "Dinner" and "Toby Grey" are really the two stories in the collection that O'Brien should have kept and made sure the rest were up to their quality. But he shows potential and I'd gladly read more by him, if only to see how he develops as a writer.

very good stories of daily life:
This is a first book from a recent Harvard graduate. These stories deal with real-life subjects, like depression, love and loneliness. One story looks at parts of growing up and being a teenager about which society has a tendency to forget. Another story is about a man who carries on a friendship/relationship with a young woman with bulimia, to the displeasure of his live-in girlfriend. A third story is about a young writer searching for himself. In short, each of these characters runs smack into this thing called "life." These stories look at how they deal with it. This very short book belongs in that large gray area of Pretty Good or Worth Reading. There is nothing "wrong" with these stories, and the writer has lots of potential (I would be interested in reading his next book), but this book almost reaches the level of Recommended.

This and That:
Unlike the other reviewer, I see nothing special in the tale of Toby Grey, it's just Ordinary People with a bit of sex thrown in. What makes O'Brien interesting is his willingness to try different forms out, after all, in this kind of writing, it's the journey that matters, not the arrival. So you get a tale like "Indian Summer" right next to a play like "Existential Dilemma," almost a story stripped of everything but dialogue, between two students called Jane and Ray who are trying to decide what they would do (in a hypothetical way) if, say, they had only one hour to live. Then the dilemma comes when they start wondering if they aren't really only characters in an absurdist play: "If we really are in a play, when it ends, we wouldn't know it. We'd cease to exist. We'd die," argues Jane. Ray counters with an offer to prove otherwise, bringing in a rubber ball. "If I bounce this ball off of a wall, and it doesn't come back to me, then that wall isn't really real, right?" Somehow he convinces her to have sex with him if he can prove that the world is real! I'll be curious to see what the next book is from PulpLit, because they've certainly come up with an unusual collection this time.