Sightseeing, by Rattawut Lapcharoensap

By Rattawut Lapcharoensap. Viking Canada, 206 pp, $28, hardcover.

Debut collection is like first love. Both terms seem trite--both are trite, in a sexy-sincere way--but there's more. Both toggle between high excitement one moment and wrist-shredding disappointment before that moment's done; both seem great until the real thing comes along and starts ponying up half the mortgage; both are mercifully short; mile wide, inch deep.

Sightseeing is 25-year-old Rattawut Lapcharoensap's debut. Born in Chicago, raised in Bangkok, and a recent grad of University of Michigan's creative-writing program, Lapcharoensap has seduced those hard-hearted gatekeepers at magazines like Granta, Glimmer Train, and Zoetrope: All Story. And he's grabbed all the best fellowships, awards, scholarships, and prizes that American programs jiggle before randy MFA students.

The collection's six stories and a novella reflect Thailand as felt and observed by adolescents living there: a post-Edenic culture where hunger for tourist dollars brings locals disgrace and decay, nasty habits (paint thinner and methamphetamine), and confusion (why don't the pretty western girls fall in love with local boys?).

Each story skirts the paradox of exotic paradise in the land of cockfight and draft lottery. "Pussy and elephants. That's all these people want," says the mother of the narrator of "Farangs". She's referring to the French, who like "plump girls, rambutans, disco music, baring their breasts"; the Brits who visit Thailand to "work on their pasty complexions, their penchant for hashish"; and the Americans, Italians, Japanese, Aussies, and Chinese, each with their own penchants and condoms. This reality is appealing as literature, but it no longer seems fresh. Prepube hookers tend Germans in Thailand: this is news?

In each story, though, Lapcharoensap provides a different tour guide. All come with a teenager's gift for the simultaneous sarcastic quip and heartfelt emotion, each fits memorably into the short story's coming-of-age subgenre. And he never dismisses the loathing--or underestimates the longing--these kids feel for western culture, most aptly expressed in one boy's beloved pig, Clint Eastwood.

"Brilliant debut collection"? No. The writing is often very sloppy. But often enough it's also tight and taut and yet as fat with con- and subtext as short stories are meant to be.

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