Tough-minded reports from the marital frontlines, by a writer with the keen eye of a reporter for the telling detail and apt metaphor. Kaplan’s first collection (a Flannery O’Connor Award winner) offers nine varied takes on the complexities of relationships. The powerful title story deals with a husband’s increasingly frantic attempts to come to grips with his wife’s breakdown; rarely in recent fiction has a writer caught so well the warring elements of affection, resentment, hope, and panic created when a spouse becomes incapable of self-sustainment. The husband here yearns to leave and at the same time feels deeply responsible; the burden both terrifies and exhilarates him, leaving him “kneeling on the edge of something . . . looking over a drop so sheer as to be unimaginable.” The woman narrator of “Dyaesthesia” is thrown into tumult by the need to cope with the results of a traffic accident in which her husband lost a hand and with the revelation that he was having an affair. Pain, she discovers, once known only in passing moments, has become a permanent resident in her life. All of Kaplan’s tales deal with relationships damaged or deformed by need or by the stubborn denial of failure. In “From Where We’ve Fallen,” a successful caterer, trying to avoid the fact that a grown son is a thief, lies to his wife and to a client, cruelly mistreats an employee, knowing that he can—t protect his son but can’t help himself from trying. “Claude Comes and Goes” traces the lingering effects on a longtime marriage when the wife’s former lover returns, mortally ill. Her husband is startled by Claude’s ability to evoke emotions in his wife that he himself can—t arouse. Claude’s arrival drives the husband to acknowledge how easily marriage can become more a pleasurable routine than sustaining bond, and how unknowable a loved one can remain. A precisely observant collection, unsparing, original, and resonant.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8203-2148-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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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