Autobiography and imagination walking hand in hand into the sunset.
Twenty-two often witty, sometimes-disquieting short stories from chameleon stylist Crane (The History of Great Things, 2016, etc.).
Crane tends to rely on droll gimmicks in her short fiction, but when she does stick the landing, it’s often an elegant, unexpected solution. There’s a lot of obsession with stuff here—in “Roosters” (a stream-of-consciousness hunt-and-peck through a grocery store), “Here Everything’s Better” (more shopping), “We Collect Things” (a sly indictment of hoarder culture), and “Looking” (a catalog of the things the narrator likes). Elsewhere, Crane skewers the hubris of intellect in “The Genius Meetings,” tabloid culture in “Star Babies,” and the weighty self-importance of literary fiction in “Notes for an Important American Story.” It’s not to say that Crane can’t be quite poignant, even in the short form. Two fragments about friendship, “Best Friends Seriously Forever” and “Old Friends,” flip from silly to heartbreaking and back on a dime. But then the collection slides straight into insubstantial dalliances like “Justin Bieber’s Hair in a Box” and “Stella’s Thing,” which can’t even be bothered to belabor its own point: "Anyway, this wasn’t that long ago. So we don’t really know how it’s going to turn out. Probably, this won’t be the rest of her life. Does it have to be?” Other devices are more successful, like the musings on the fluid nature of time in “Where Time Goes” and the existential catalog of fears in “Some Concerns.” When the stories stretch out, it makes a difference, most notably in the kinky Hollywood melodrama “Mr. and Mrs. P Are Married” and the stellar “Today in Post-Apocalyptic Problems.” Despite the author’s dependence on literary sleight of hand, sometimes the truth sneaks out, as it does in the opening story, “Everywhere, Now”: “It’s still me, you know that right? It’s always me.”
Autobiography and imagination walking hand in hand into the sunset.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61902-934-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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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