Minor work from the author of The Courage Consort (2004, etc.), though animated by a polished, oddly engaging nastiness.
Eccentrics, misfits, sociopaths and outright criminals populate the cosmopolitan (Dutch-born, now Scottish) author’s sleek, disturbing, gruesomely funny short stories.
His second collection includes 16 brisk extended vignettes whose thinly characterized protagonists are cogs in varied familial, marital and bureaucratic machines. Orwell and Kafka are channeled in the misadventure of a disoriented homeless man who foregoes recovering his forgotten past, preferring “the gift of brute shelter” offered by the regimented comforts of “The Safehouse.” A divorced father returns his young daughter home from a visit to the house he shares with his male lover, until their interrupted train journey takes them in an unanticipated direction (“All Black”). In “Andy Comes Back,” a recovered comatose patient is briefly reunited with the family who had believed him lost to them forever—before choosing the life he knows he’s now meant to live. Faber creates memorably subversive images of embattled family dynamics in the plaintive story of an unfit mother attempting to shed self-destructive addictions and reclaim her young son from foster care (“Serious Swimmers”); an ironic look at a self-absorbed father’s imagined competition with his freedom-seeking teenaged children (the title story); and a horrific conte cruel in which a beleaguered new mother serendipitously discovers how to disable her newborn’s constant demands (“The Smallness of the Action”). Faber miscalculates in stories that do not fulfill the promises of their premises (a supermarket worker’s macho fantasies in “Less Than Perfect”; conventioneers driven to erotic frenzy by lectures on the physiology of the eponymous fruit in “Explaining Coconuts”). But echoes of Saki, John Collier and Roald Dahl are heard in depictions of an ailing dictator matching wits with the imprisoned woman surgeon who alone can save him (“Finesse”); an arrogant Scots couple unhinged by their flirtation with life in “the wild” (“A Hole with Two Ends”); and a violent thug whose compulsive mayhem leads him back to “Someone to Kiss It Better.”
Minor work from the author of The Courage Consort (2004, etc.), though animated by a polished, oddly engaging nastiness.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-15-101314-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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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