A well-honed but emotionally distant experiment in the manifestation of character.
A multi–award-winning short story leads this showcase of desert-dry tales of life’s rich pageant.
For his second literary outing, Moffett (Permanent Visitors, 2006) continues in the desiccated vein of stories that find their protagonists at razor’s-edge crossroads in their sad, lonely lives. The widely available and praised title story has been published in both McSweeney’s and The Best American Short Stories 2010. It is the kind of story that short-story artists love, blending the art of writing and the disquiet of real life into metafiction that is clever without being coy. The story is narrated by Frederick Moxley, a writing instructor and unpaid writer of literary stories. His father takes to writing and submitting short stories to those ill-read literary journals, inspiring jealously in the son and quiet grief in the father. Literati-minded folks will linger on the younger Moxley’s hilarious mentor, an insane writing teacher named Harry Hodgett whose writing advice Moffett violates with abandon. “A story needs to sing like a wound,” Hodgett advises. “I mean, put your father and son in the same room together. Leave some weapons lying around.” Other stories are intriguing in their own way, even when they revisit similar themes. “Buzzers” and “English Made Easy” revolve around the internalized turmoil of grief and its aftermath, while “Lugo in Normal Time” eavesdrops on a sodden divorcee and part-time father who realizes in the midst of breaking things around him that he is, right now, in real trouble. Remembered moments of another sort populate the sadly romantic “First Marriage,” in which newlyweds Tad and Amy discover the harsh realities of togetherness as they make their way across the desert in a stolen car with an inexplicable odor of dead snake. The only anomaly in the bunch may be the final story, “One Dog Year,” which re-imagines John D. Rockefeller’s only plane ride, replacing historical realism with fictional gloss.
A well-honed but emotionally distant experiment in the manifestation of character.Pub Date: March 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-206921-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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