An uneven but fascinating collection of 20 stories (dating from 1950—68): a welcome companion volume to 1997’s The Springs of Affection, which likewise showcased the work of the late (1916—93) New Yorker staff writer. Many of the pieces here previously appeared in Brennan’s In and Out of Never-Never Land (1969) and Christmas Eve (1974). All are uniformly limpid, precisely phrased glimpses of (mostly) Irish-American women imperfectly adapting to their new lives. In several related stories, set in “Herbert’s Retreat,” a posh Hudson River enclave north of New York City, Brennan bleakly observes the social maladroitness of Leona Harkey, a parvenu trying nervously to “fit in,” and the acidulous preciosity of her permanent guest-mentor, persnickety theater critic Charles Runyon (“Taffeta? Leona, how could you!—). Another group of stories records—quite convincingly—the —adventures,” and even the thoughts and dreams, of Bluebell, an aging Labrador retriever who inhabits a fabricated milieu that’s both old-moneyed exurbia and (it seems, literally) “never-never land.” But the real heart of the collection beats in five superb tales focused with Chekhovian concentration on “little” people vulnerable to both changing personal circumstances and the simple passage of time: the irascible “ladies’-room lady” (“The Holy Terror”) who outlives her usefulness, and takes a petty, ineffectual revenge on her tormentors; the country woman (of “The Beginning of a Long Story”) too “eternally unsure of herself” to accept her family’s unconditional love; the self-deluding “artistic” couple (“The Bohemians”) who render their dutiful son unfit for any life outside their own artificial orbit. Brennan had a real genius tor tracing the downward arcs followed by people who perversely throw away their best chances for happiness. Her finest stories resemble and rival the fiction of Frank O’Connor and Mary Lavin, and are well worth retrieving.
Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2000
ISBN: 1-58243-050-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
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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