Understated lyricism very much in what William Carlos Williams (whom Hall often resembles) called the “American grain.”...
The tug of kinship and the human frailties that undermine traditional family solidarity and values figure prominently in this interesting collection by the poet and memoirist (Life Work, 1993, etc.).
Six stories of the twelve here are reprinted from The Ideal Bakery (1987). Of the original tales, the extremely sketchy “The Fifth Box” is an obvious fictionalization of the passing of Hall’s late wife poet Jane Kenyon—and three stories of varying quality record occasions in the life of presumably fictional alter ego David Bardo. “The Accident,” set in the early 1940s, observes David’s parents wasting their lives in weekend tavern-crawling, and suggests how his maturing is simultaneously a growing away from them. The ampler “Lake Paradise” details David’s separation from a girlfriend whose family incarnates working-class vulgarity, as his parents’ values control his actions. And “Roast Suckling Pig,” which finds David settled in domesticity and a diplomatic career, charts the course of his affair with a mercurial, flagrantly dishonest married woman (rather pointedly named Alma Trust). Two longer, more substantial stories examine the lingering effects of infidelity. “New England Primer” portrays the quiet heroism of its narrator’s father, a small-town physician who makes a new life for them both when David’s mother leaves them, stoically takes her back and surrenders his own happiness when she becomes widowed and ill, and—through the narrator’s intervention—is eventually reunited with the younger woman whom he had rescued from her malignant family. It’s overplotted, but undeniably affecting. “From Willow Temple,” the best piece here, is a superb combination of reverie and unsparing self-analysis: an elderly woman’s acceptance of the respective failings of her straying mother and passionless father, as she understands how their imperfect marriage has shaped her own lifelong momentum toward frustration and loneliness.
Understated lyricism very much in what William Carlos Williams (whom Hall often resembles) called the “American grain.” Moving and memorable.Pub Date: May 7, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-32981-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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