Strongest and freshest when it explores the terra infirma of old age.
National Book Award winner Barth’s latest (Where Three Roads Meet, 2005, etc.), a slender collection of linked stories set on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
Heron Bay Estates is an oddity for the region: a gated community of the Florida type, complete with resident stickers, a clubhouse and a homeowner’s association. Many residents are retirees, some making the slow transition from mansions to either “villas” (horizontal duplexes) or “coach homes” (vertical duplexes), and from there the sad move to assisted living. The best work here is the most conventional. In “Peeping Tom,” the community is in some ways brought together, in some ways sundered, in others simply entertained by the possibility that a stranger may be peering in through windows at bodies and lives that seem to their owners increasingly invisible and unsought-after. Equally strong is “Toga Party,” the account of a lavish elder-bacchanal that ends with a loving couple deciding spontaneously, but with chilling persuasiveness, to commit suicide by asphyxiation in their garage. The book is weakest when the author does what he did more inventively and exuberantly years ago, as in several tales narrated by retired creative-writing professor George Newett that feature Barth’s hallmark postmodern indeterminacy and self-consciousness. There are broad hints that the book is fiction devised by Newett, or devised by Barth devising behind Newett. That’s the sort of fiction the author prefers, we sense, as Newett, comparing his own stories to the “more imaginative perpetrations” of a student, laments that they seem like “pallid rehashes” of Updike, Cheever and O’Hara, “the muted epiphanies and petty nuances of upper-middle-class life.” This anxiety drains some power from his low-key, clear-eyed, battered-but-unbowed portrait of the diminishments and minor pleasures of age. Barth’s prose still has its sinew and snap; he examines near-decrepitude with mordant, rueful wit. No need for narratorial hand-wringing over failure to push the fictional envelope.
Strongest and freshest when it explores the terra infirma of old age.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-547-07248-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
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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