Toole won't dazzle anyone with footwork, but there's a core of integrity to his fiction that can rivet a reader, patches of...
A debut collection of six stories about the world of boxing, from an insider who finds beauty in its ugliness, sweetness in its savagery.
The title piece is a prime example: veteran trainer Mac McGee loves his young fighter, loves him for his talent and boundless willingness, but perhaps even more for the goodness as natural to him as the grace and power of his punches. Mac is white, “Puddin’” Pye, the boy, black, but from the day they met the relationship was transcendently father and son, color an irrelevance. The beginning of the story deals with that warmth and caring between them. A bit too predictably—nuance is not Toole's strength—the mood darkens, foreshadowing the kind of extravagant violence that links all six of the tales. In “Frozen Water,” a naïve country boy is beaten almost to death by a conscienceless bully. In “Million $$$ Baby,” a young woman boxer, sucker-punched by her treacherous opponent, has a freak fall and breaks her neck. “The Monkey Look” is about a fighter who's taken far too many merciless shots to the head and eyes. And so on. Worthwhile people suffer terrible punishment from no-goods, who often as not get away with it. In Toole's world, justice is at best an in and outer. He'd like it to be different, but this long-time, real-life corner man has stanched too much blood from too many illegal blows to believe in fantasy. Instead, he'll settle for the “magic” so vividly depicted here—the iron magic “of will, skill, and pain.”
Toole won't dazzle anyone with footwork, but there's a core of integrity to his fiction that can rivet a reader, patches of awkwardness notwithstanding. The wallop is in the details.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-019820-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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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