Goodison knows the emotional space she wants her stories to occupy, but most are too brief and simplistic to generate much...
Betrayal is the emotional cornerstone of this collection of Jamaican-set stories by poet and memoirist Goodison (English/Univ. of Michigan, From Harvey River, 2008, etc.).
Each of these 22 stories—most previously published in U.K. and Jamaican collections—is marked by the lyrical patois of Goodison’s characters, who generally hail from the country’s lower-middle classes. Her graceful language, however, too often serves moralizing plots. In “House Colour,” for instance, a young woman rebuffs a wealthy suitor who’s too dim to realize his money doesn’t impress her; lovely lines about her “looking around for some spare love lying accidentally somewhere, a kiss left languidly on a smooth surface” are negated with wooden dialogue in which the man boasts he’ll “lay siege to your life till you surrender…to me.” Well-worn conflicts abound: In “God’s Help,” a woman rejects a church’s charity after she detects a preacher’s insincerity; in “Bella Makes Life,” a man is at a loss to adjust to his wife’s new high standards after she returns from a U.S. trip; in “The Big Shot,” a prideful man tries to cover up his affair with a woman he sees as below his station, before receiving his inevitable comeuppance. Those stories come from a 1990 collection; those drawn from a 2005 book showcase more sophisticated conflicts and moral ambiguity. For instance, “Alice and the Dancing Angel” adds a dose of magical realism to the story of a dancer desperate to escape her life’s degradations, and “Mi Amiga Gran” follows a young girl’s growing self-awareness as her mother’s financial support disappears. “I Come Through,” told in the form of a famous singer recalling her life story for a reporter, ingeniously caps the collection. It's unfortunate that so many thin tales precede it.
Goodison knows the emotional space she wants her stories to occupy, but most are too brief and simplistic to generate much feeling.Pub Date: May 29, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-212735-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
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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