Though the author teaches at Vassar, these stories have a lot more punch and life than academic, creative-writing exercises.
A virtuosic short-story collection by the prize-winning author.
The stories by Means (The Secret Goldfish, 2004, etc.) defy categorization. There are 15 of them in this slim volume, a couple as short as a (long) paragraph, yet they resist the tag of “minimalism.” Instead, they are dense with detail, character and theme, and they connect in some surprising ways that aren’t immediately apparent. One about the power of water leads to another that culminates in a mysterious drowning. Different characters with seminary training come to terms with what the stunning title story calls “goatlike carnality.” Two successive stories have crucifixion as a central image. Others concern crimes or scams, narratives infused with a hard-boiled morality, yet “Reading Chekhov” has a formal elegance in its illumination of adultery. The landscape is largely unromanticized Midwestern, stretching from Canada to Oklahoma (“the crank state”), one of the two states that provides the title of a story. The other is “Nebraska,” about a couple on the lam who can’t help but evoke the Starkweather association of Bruce Springsteen’s album Nebraska, but who are attempting to “capture the spirit of Bonnie and Clyde—not the actual historical characters, who seemed messy and dirty, not to mention dead, but the ones portrayed by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.” Many of the pieces are about storytellers—hoboes attempting to cadge a meal, a prostitute and her pimp. The stories within the stories, like the fiction of Means through which they are framed, often have an archetypal quality transcending the characters (many unnamed), as if something immutable in the human condition keeps repeating itself: “The story would end and then it would just keep going, the way this one does.”
Though the author teaches at Vassar, these stories have a lot more punch and life than academic, creative-writing exercises.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-86547-912-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
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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