With her typical easy wit and down-home charm, Smith (Saving Grace, 1995, etc.) fashions an epistolary novella from that most infamous of genres, the annual family letter that often arrives in Christmas cards. The three generations of Christmas letters in Smith's genial narrative span 50 years, and evolve as dramatically as their means of reproduction, from crude carbon copies to mimeograph to Xeroxes- -from the personal to the word-processed. Each letter records the significant events of the year before, beginning in 1944, when Birdie Pickett writes home to West Virginia about her marriage, her first child, and the loneliness she feels in North Carolina, where she lives with her in-laws while her new husband serves in the South Pacific. Later letters chronicle his return home, his effort to run the family farm, the destruction of the farm in a flood, and the opening of a dime store in town. Birdie's terse epistles always end with a recipe, such as ``Mrs. Goodwillie's Bible Cake,'' with its ingredients taken from Scripture. In 1967, Birdie's daughter Mary resumes the family narrative and documents her own transition from trailer-park bride to suburban matron, with four kids, a fancy house, and membership in the local country club. All of this falls apart, and in 1993, Mary writes the first ``real'' Christmas letter, one that doesn't hide the truth; her narrative includes her feelings about (among other things) her recent messy divorce, her brother's tragic return from Vietnam, her husband's history of infidelity, and her oldest son's homosexuality. A single letter from Mary's daughter Melanie (in the present) includes her own efforts to research family history, which is what the past has now become—fodder for her planned novel. A clever idea that finds its own suitable length: Smith's short novel leaves so much unsaid, as befits the semi-public epistolary genre, but manages to reflect change in humble matters, even in something so simple as a recipe. A delight. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 31, 1996
ISBN: 1-56512-156-2
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.
One of America’s great novelists (Lost Memory of Skin, 2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.
Don’t expect atmospheric mood poems or avant-garde stylistic games in these dozen tales. Banks is a traditionalist, interested in narrative and character development; his simple, flexible prose doesn’t call attention to itself as it serves those aims. The intricate, not necessarily permanent bonds of family are a central concern. The bleak, stoic “Former Marine” depicts an aging father driven to extremes because he’s too proud to admit to his adult sons that he can no longer take care of himself. In the heartbreaking title story, the death of a beloved dog signals the final rupture in a family already rent by divorce. Fraught marriages in all their variety are unsparingly scrutinized in “Christmas Party,” Big Dog” and “The Outer Banks." But as the collection moves along, interactions with strangers begin to occupy center stage. The protagonist of “The Invisible Parrot” transcends the anxieties of his hard-pressed life through an impromptu act of generosity to a junkie. A man waiting in an airport bar is the uneasy recipient of confidences about “Searching for Veronica” from a woman whose truthfulness and motives he begins to suspect, until he flees since “the only safe response is to quarantine yourself.” Lurking menace that erupts into violence features in many Banks novels, and here, it provides jarring climaxes to two otherwise solid stories, “Blue” and “The Green Door.” Yet Banks quietly conveys compassion for even the darkest of his characters. Many of them (like their author) are older, at a point in life where options narrow and the future is uncomfortably close at hand—which is why widowed Isabel’s fearless shucking of her confining past is so exhilarating in “SnowBirds,” albeit counterbalanced by her friend Jane’s bleak acceptance of her own limited prospects.
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-185765-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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