. Walbert’s spare first fiction takes the shape of compellingly linked stories—the splintered mosaic of a mother and daughter. Each story, titled by city and date, traces the dual journeys of Marion Clark and her daughter Rebecca, two women possessed by restlessness and entrapped by an unspeakable ennui. Marion’s “life” begins in “Niagara Falls 1955,” opening appropriately on her honeymoon with the dashing Robert, corporate executive and the era’s answer to Mr. Right. Her previous life as a young typist in Manhattan evokes images of Holly Golightly and beatnik clubs in the Village—making Marion’s eventual years spent dutifully following Robert from city to city all the more poignant. Tokyo, Rochester, Norfolk, Baltimore—Marion all but withers on the vine as each new move further fragments her identity, until the birth and subsequent death of her second daughter finally ease her over the edge into a suicide attempt and to “A Place on a Lake 1966” to recover. Yet when she returns, she hasn—t really healed—instead, she’s picked up the skill of disappearing inside herself. The young Rebecca recognizes her as “an imposter . . . a Marion balloon.” The second half of the book concerns Rebecca’s adult years. Ironically encouraged by Marion to see the world (that is, live as the mother never could), Rebecca travels from spot to spot seeking some indefinable experience to bring form to her life. Spanning nearly two decades in Jamaica, Florence, New York, Istanbul, and Ithaca, Rebecca’s narratives, far less focused than Marion’s, mirror the daughter’s fluid existence, marked mostly by the men she encounters. Though stylistically lovely, the mirage-like tales from Rebecca’s life lack the vitality (as does Rebecca herself, compared with Marion) to sustain the connection between the two sections. Still, Walbert’s fluid, evocative language finally recovers a debut that occasionally falters in design.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-889330-15-9
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
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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