A strong, fine collection overall, if not consistently stellar. (Many of these pieces first appeared in The Paris Review,...
Debut collection of 11 humorous, heartfelt stories by novelist Hood (Ruby, 1998, etc.), with characters who find small, determined ways to shock the bourgeoisie in and around Providence.
The opener details a nutty affair between a 40-ish, teetering-on-the-wagon divorcée and the reverend who “saves” her. “Total Cave Darkness,” which chronicles the pair’s summer road trip across the country, brings into play all of Hood's marvelous skills: her quirky characterization, stylistic intelligence, and adroit timing combine to produce an ending that the reader feels in the gut. Elsewhere, while her people always come brilliantly to life, the author often spoils her delirious effects by forcing a pat conclusion. “The Rightness of Things,” for example, pursues the deepening of an acquaintance between two young mothers, one married and one divorced, but ultimately disappoints when they fall out over conflicting ideas of sexual political correctness. “New People” has a similarly strained twist as it depicts the hot summer affair between middle-aged Marjorie, a longtime resident in the neighborhood, and her parvenu yard-boy. “Inside Gorbachev’s Head” pursues another cross-generational romance, between Brown student Elliot and his mother’s friend Georgia, while also tracing a bizarre network of relationships and adoptions. “Joelle’s Mother,” told in the first-person plural, revisits the painful prehistory of a family of sisters through the presence of their father’s previous wife’s daughter. Men don’t necessarily behave well in these stories, particularly not fathers, who frequently desert or cheat on their wives (pregnant or otherwise), as in “After Zane.” Hood strikes a more elegiac tone in “The Language of Sorrow,” which shows a 78-year-old woman’s memories of her dead son being revived by her visiting grandson’s similarly self-destructive behavior, and in the title story, a lovely description of an 11-year-old girl watching the behavior of birds and adults as she comes of age in 1974 in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
A strong, fine collection overall, if not consistently stellar. (Many of these pieces first appeared in The Paris Review, Glimmer Train, etc.)Pub Date: July 19, 2004
ISBN: 0-393-05900-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
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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