Edwards debuts with 11 stories, set all over the globe, that share little beyond her clean, fluent style—a clarity somewhat dissipated by heavy dramatic ironies and polemic. In the most aggressive piece, ``The Story of My Life,'' the daughter of a prominent anti-abortion protestor discovers her mother to be a hypocrite and opportunist. Equally deadening in its topicality, ``The Invitation'' shows little sympathy for the Englishwoman who has lived in the Third World for 30 years, during which she learned almost nothing about the native culture. Other stories set in Asia prove relatively more subtle: In ``Sky Juice,'' a village girl in Malaysia escapes prostitution, with a friend's help, by becoming a mail-order bride; in ``Gold,'' a rubber-plant worker form a small village becomes obsessed with digging for gold, but later substitutes spiritual riches for his worldly desires; in ``Bat Stories,'' a married Western agricultural planner will go to any length to save his funding, including an affair with the program evaluator; and in ``The Great Chain of Being,'' a Third World leader pretends that fate, not his will, confines his daughter to home; she of course eventually bends history to her will in a major way. Such reversals are commonplace in Edwards's right-minded fictions, especially in the title piece about backwoods religious revivals and a fire-eater whose tricks are used against him. A trapeze artist tests her husband's love rather dramatically in ``Balance,'' much like the 19-year-old girl in ``The Way It Felt To Be Falling,'' who conquers her fears by sky- diving. The best story, ``Spring, Mountain, Sea,'' suggests that it's never too late for a husband to learn something profound about his seemingly inscrutable wife. Utterly out of place, if not simply an exercise, is a story in the voice of Madame Curie's admiring housekeeper. A talented writer still in search of subjects worthy of her craft.
Pub Date: March 24, 1997
ISBN: 0-393-04026-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
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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