But Mason hasn’t been often at her best since early in her career. Sadly, Zigzagging does little to reverse the downward...
Appropriately homely imagery and dead-solid perfect dialogue help some, but don’t do nearly enough to animate the morose folks who wander through the 11 uneven stories in this third collection from the Kentucky author (Midnight Magic (1998); Clear Springs (1999).
Most of those characters are women returning to their old abandoned Kentucky homes in the wake of compulsive meandering, busted marriages, or affairs that have gone nowhere. For example, the earthy protagonist of “With Jazz,” twice-divorced, mourning the daughter who died in childhood, ceaselessly bar-hopping. Or Wendy, of “Night Flight,” seen “returning to the place she had once been so eager to escape,” hoping good-ol’-boy Bob may after all love her as much as he loves a good time; or divorced Sandra McCain (of “The Funeral Side”), back from Alaska to stay with her widowed father, a mortician whose dutiful relationship with death is in fact the source of his resilience and strength. Too many of these pieces recycle essentially similar premises and details, remain undeveloped, and trail off into inconclusive endings. Mason’s prose has a certain colloquial snap and lilt, and she’s capable of both quietly arresting metaphors (“Snow made hats on garbage cans”) and deadpan hilarious renderings of colloquial speech (“He had one eyebrow that went all the way across. Them’s the guys to watch out for”) that occasionally recall Flannery O’Connor at her devastating best. But on balance this is a disappointing volume, redeemed only by moments in “A Funeral Side,” and two unqualified successes. “Tobrah” recounts 40ish, (again!) twice-divorced Jackie’s slow, troubled bonding with her five-year-old half-sister, the child of her father’s old age, bequeathed to her perhaps as a mocking revelation of the comforts of motherhood to which Jackie has come too late. And “Charger,” about a 19-year-old working in a fertilizer plant and fighting off both depression and the temptation to settle down with his agreeably trashy girlfriend, is a laconic, bittersweet beauty.
But Mason hasn’t been often at her best since early in her career. Sadly, Zigzagging does little to reverse the downward trend.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-44924-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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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