Eleven polished stories, a few of which have appeared in GQ and Playboy, that insist on their rawness and grit but seem to involve lots of writing-school posturing about cowboy life out in Utah, Texas, and Arizona. Udall's carpenter chic self-consciously draws him to men ``stricken with heartache and fracture and fallen hopes'': men, in other words, who drink too much, live too hard, and suffer ``the confusion that comes with being lost in the world''—though for no- account losers and ``irretrievable failures,'' they sure do speak eloquently. In ``Midnight Raid,'' a divorced and drunk dad sneaks up on his ex-wife's new house to deliver a pet goat for his son, against the mother's wishes. Another regular guy, a handyman who drives a ``cowboy truck'' and is irresistible to women, finds himself infatuated with a pretty girl suffering from a nervous disorder (``Junk Court''). ``Ballad of Ball and Chain'' makes its cynical comment about marriage pretty explicitly: A bachelor-party prank leads to the groom's accidental death and leaves his guilt- ridden best man with only one way to punish himself—by getting married. A teenage boy's perspective lends some innocence to other tough-guy tales: In ``Buckeye the Elder,'' the narrator's sister takes up with a man who charms the whole family, an illiterate reformed alcoholic who's converted to Mormonism; and in ``He Becomes Deeply and Famously Drunk,'' a juvenile delinquent whose father died when he was five returns to the ranch his father worked and discovers responsibility in work as a cowboy. In the most affirmative story, ``The Opposite of Loneliness,'' a middle-aged divorced man discovers real familial joy as the supervisor of a group home for the ``developmentally challenged.'' The macho blather wears thin, and the mystery men aren't as intriguing as their creator might think, but beneath the affected surfaces it's clear that Udall has talent. He remains a writer worth watching. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-393-04033-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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