Corny, trite, and delightful: tales sure to delight anyone who has ever cried over a good rendition of “Danny Boy”—or passed...
Enough Christmas stories—52 in all—to last the whole year long, each one generously laced with classic Keane blarney (An Irish Christmas, 2000, etc.).
Keane, who died this past May, was something of a national institution in Ireland. As famed for the pub he ran in Listowel, County Kerry, as he was for his writing, he exemplified the tradition of the Irish storyteller and was a phenomenally prolific and popular author. His Christmas stories were especially prized, and he collects a great haul of them here. Most are simple, homely tales depicting the foibles of small-town (usually Listowel) life and the motley, somewhat roguish characters who live there. If Keane is to be believed, the average Irishman spends much of his life trying, with only modest success, to walk a straight line along the boundary that separates honesty from vice. Edgar Guff (of “The Course of Time”) is a good example: a drunkard and layabout, Edgar is shamed into repentance by eavesdropping on his own wife’s confession on Christmas Eve. Then there’s Mickey Dooley (“The Great Christmas Raid at Ballyhooley”), a local thief who was wounded in a heist and saved his reputation by blaming it all on the Black and Tans. Ned Muddle (“The Miracle of Ballybradawn”) is another scamp saved in spite of himself: a salmon poacher, he’s pursued by game wardens and can escape only by dropping in at church for Midnight Mass—for the first time in 15 years. But this isn’t only a rogues’ gallery: There is a touching portrait of the career of the parish priest Canon Coodle in “The Fourth Wise Man,” and we find occasional meditations on life in general (as in “Christmas Noses,” which offers a few observations on the nature of nasal congestion).
Corny, trite, and delightful: tales sure to delight anyone who has ever cried over a good rendition of “Danny Boy”—or passed out at a Pogues concert.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7867-1054-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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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