Mason has written some fine novels, in particular In Country (1985) and Feather Crowns (1993), but the short-story form has...
Four previously published stories, a novella and two new tales follow the author’s semi-autobiographical heroine in an uneasy back-and-forth between her native Kentucky and the wider world.
Like her creator, Nancy Culpepper is a farm girl who went to graduate school up north, married a non-Kentuckian and stayed away, without ever being able to much loosen the tenacious bonds that held her to her parents and her country roots. In modest, unassuming prose studded with simple, revelatory details, Mason (An Atomic Romance, 2005, etc.) traces Nancy’s odyssey over a quarter-century as her grandmother dies (“Blue Country”), her mother is treated for breast cancer (“Spence Lila”) and Nancy separates briefly from her husband (“Proper Gypsies”), sells the family farm (“The Heirs”) and learns she is going to be a grandmother (“The Prelude”). Son Robert is only a shadowy presence, and although Nancy’s fraught marriage to photographer Jack is subtly delineated, that too never has quite the emotional force as her relationship with her kin and her past. Mason writes with quiet authority about that most unfashionable of American subjects, class differences; we see that Nancy has always been the unusual one in her family, the one with her nose stuck in a book, “meant to use her mind.” But she never feels entirely at home among northern intellectuals, and we see that some of the problems in her marriage stem from Jack’s frustration with her overriding commitment to her birth family. Yet, as Nancy acknowledges in “The Heirs,” “she had gone away and not shared her life with them, except in her imagination.” This story and “The Prelude” remind us that such divided loyalties are the lot of every artist, no matter what her origins.
Mason has written some fine novels, in particular In Country (1985) and Feather Crowns (1993), but the short-story form has always seemed especially congenial to her; there’s hardly a wasted word or a sloppy sentence in this quiet, gently moving collection.Pub Date: July 18, 2006
ISBN: 0-375-50718-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
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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