A welcome reminder of this still-evolving writer’s steadfast mindfulness and clarity of vision.
Often concerned with themes of Catholic faith in both nonfiction (Joan of Arc, 2000) and fiction (Pearl, 2005), the versatile Gordon demonstrates her stylistic staying power in 41 stories written over several decades.
Twenty-two of them are “new and uncollected”; the rest appeared in Temporary Shelter (1987). Taken as a whole, the array demonstrates Gordon’s increasing narrative sophistication. The earlier collection’s title story, for example, deals in a rather flat, straightforward manner with the themes of ethnicity and heritage that dominate her work—in this case, the shame a Polish maid’s 13-year-old son feels for his mother in the presence of her sophisticated, educated employer. Also in the previous volume, “The Only Son of the Doctor” treats a familiar love affair between an urbane middle-aged journalist and a modest country doctor whose adult son ultimately reveals the fissures in their doomed relationship. Yet Gordon’s preoccupation with methods of storytelling, as evinced early on by her humorous reworking of classic fairy-tale themes in “A Writing Lesson,” morphs in the newer stories into several playfully self-conscious narratives. “I Need to Tell Three Stories and to Speak of Love and Death,” for example, begs the reader to help connect three seemingly unrelated tales that end in mortality and ugliness. Similarly, the narrator of “Vision” questions the kind of information a storyteller leaves in and takes out as she ponders a yarn her mother’s best friend spins on the front porch. The more recent stories also have a more muscular, socially conscious quality. The spare, nearly angry “Conversations in Prosperity” shows two older women relying on their easy friendship to shield them from life’s harsh, sad truths, while “Separation” is a dry-as-bones account of a single mother struggling between her love for her son and her own legacy of neglect and abandonment.
A welcome reminder of this still-evolving writer’s steadfast mindfulness and clarity of vision.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-375-42316-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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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