Sensitively observed, elegantly written snapshots of the human condition, unsparing yet tender.
Connecting with other people is the only thing harder than being alone in this piercing collection from gifted Scottish novelist Kennedy (Day, 2007, etc.).
The complex, often agonizing negotiations of marriage are the subject of several fine stories. “What Becomes,” an internal monologue by a man sitting in a movie theater, unreels memories of his bizarre behavior after he cuts himself in the kitchen and his wife’s despairing response; they’ve lost a daughter, we gradually realize, and are painfully estranged in their separate mourning. The infestation in “Wasps” illustrates a traveling businessman’s insouciance in the face of his wife’s sorrow over his infidelities and his sons’ grief over his absences. Male violence roils “Marriage,” a creepy monologue by an abusive husband, and “Saturday Teatime,” narrated by a woman unable to suppress childhood memories of laughing hysterically at an afternoon TV show so that her friend wouldn’t hear the sounds of her father beating her mother. Yet troubled spouses can sustain each other as well, like the couple in “Confectioner’s Gold” dealing with bankruptcy in the aftermath of the economic meltdown. The longing for companionship suffuses many tales, notably the risky but triumphant “Sympathy,” which portrays a one-night stand with graphic sexual frankness that illuminates the protagonists’ loneliness and sadness. The widow of a popular but nasty children’s entertainer finally gets a good man in “Another,” though it’s more than a little weird that he’s a performer hired to replicate her dead husband’s signature character, Uncle Shaun. Happiness is neither easily achieved nor unmixed in Kennedy’s stories, but she’s compassionate toward even her most damaged creations, aware that we find pleasure where we can. The rowdy amputees at a public pool in “As God Made Us” and the oddballs waiting around a stage door for the magician they idolize in “Vanish” find it in camaraderie with fellow misfits: “They’re all going nowhere. Together.”
Sensitively observed, elegantly written snapshots of the human condition, unsparing yet tender.Pub Date: April 8, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-27354-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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
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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