Rich, mature, authoritative stories veined with respectful attention to the complexity and singularity of vagrant, cluttered...
Its dreadful title is just about the only thing wrong with this stunning tenth collection from Canada’s matchless chronicler of women’s external fates, inner lives, and painful journeys toward and away from self-understanding (The Love of a Good Woman, 1998, etc.).
Munro’s nine tales are set mostly in her native Ontario or in western Canada (often Vancouver island), and realized with steely precise statement and in meticulously deployed specific local detail. Their scrupulously seen protagonists include a young wife who’ll keep forever the clandestine glimpse of “another sort of life she could have had,” caught during her one brief extramarital adventure (“What is Remembered”); a cancer victim impulsively seizing a moment of romantic escape from her distracted husband’s inconsistent devotion (“Floating bridge”); and a woman writer who eventually realizes (in “Family Furnishings”) how she has used the image of her “fervent and dashing,” simultaneously ridiculous and stoical, unmarried aunt to avoid confronting her own fears and failings. The fusion of memory with present experience is accomplished with impressive subtlety in “Queenie” (previously published by itself in chapbook form), the tale of a rootless girl who creates a consoling fantasy about her “wild” stepsister’s seemingly comfortable marriage, and also in “Comfort,” a piece that artfully discloses the strategies by which a submissive faculty wife has adjusted to her volatile husband’s scorn for “sentimentality.” We work our way slowly into these multileveled stories, gradually learning how the minutiae of their characters’ past experiences and unlived dreams have shaped such developments as a lonely housekeeper’s gritty victory over a heartless prank that might have destroyed her (in the fine title story), or a faithless husband’s chastened adaptation to the happiness his wife finds in a nursing home (“The Bear Came Over the Mountain”). Or, in the unforgettable “Nettles,” a middle-aged woman’s bittersweet chance meeting with the man who was the love of her childhood—a “Love [she now knows] that was not usable, that knew its place.”
Rich, mature, authoritative stories veined with respectful attention to the complexity and singularity of vagrant, cluttered and compromised lives.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-41300-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
PERSPECTIVES
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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