An impressive debut, full of crisp images, sparks and heat, but also essential human dignity—all helping keep the tendency...
Twelve taut, driven stories (eight published previously), in a first collection from San Francisco writer Bjorneby, focus largely on girls and women as they experience defining moments and draw on whatever resources they can to sustain them.
The title piece pits a 40-year-old painter against despair at the loss of her entire family, including her 8-year-old son. Leaving her fate to an approaching hurricane, she waits in her beachfront house until she glimpses someone else on the beach whose despair is as great as her own. Other stories make use of the author’s Air Force upbringing. In “War Games,” a teenager and her mother live in base housing in Florida while waiting for the girl’s pilot father to finish his tour in Vietnam; the girl passes after-school hours throwing a football with a friend, her life suspended, until a civilian schoolmate begins to teach them about growing up. The girl—Max—appears again in “Christmas Bombings, 1972,” this time with her whole family in Berlin and desperate to grow up. She meets a gentle Alabama airman who protects her from the anti-American feelings rampant in the city and from herself; but he’s is shipped home before her feelings for him have a chance to mature. Other tales feature adolescent boys, like Jimmy in “The Goat,” whose desire to be one of the gang puts him squarely in the middle between the clique’s bigoted leader and a poor classmate recently arrived from a war-torn part of the world. Women in crisis predominate, however, and the stories end in San Francisco when tough, brittle Nicky (in “Mimosa”), softened by love and pregnancy and far from her days of suicidal rage, has to confront old demons after her lover is arrested in a drug bust.
An impressive debut, full of crisp images, sparks and heat, but also essential human dignity—all helping keep the tendency to finish upbeat from seeming relentless.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-57071-853-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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