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IN THE ELECTRIC EDEN

STORIES

Accomplished and promising.

Ten debut stories that draw most of their inspiration from the author’s background in engineering and then a stint working in product development for the Ford Motor Company.

“But when he mentioned engineering, his old man was incredulous. He said in a mock-gentle tone, ‘But, Duke, how can you be an engineer when you’re always breaking things?’ ” Engineering becomes the controlling metaphor here: if characters work together or fail to do so, it’s usually connected to the machines around them and to the thinking and history that brought them into being. The title story is a quasi-historical account of the lighting of Luna Park and the subsequent electrocution of an elephant named Topsy, while in “What They Teach you in Engineering School,” the progress of engineering technology measures the educational distance between a father and son even as they both realize, after a sudden trauma, that they’re all either of them has. The final piece (“Aeronautics”) is another history of early aeronauts, the warriors who made war three-dimensional, and made balloons weapons as surely as men or muskets are weapons. “Telescope” is a single sentence short-short that plays with the engineering of sentences; and when a prototype SUV breaks down in backwater Michigan (“The Prototype”), it’s a chance for a local mechanic to fool its fish-out-of-water engineers and possibly engineer for himself a lost love. While Arvin’s prose often centers on the inner workings of things on the near-mechanical level (“Instead he sat frozen and hyperaware of himself—of the noise of his breath, the twitch of his toes against his shoes, the clutch of the muscles in his chest”), the emotions are always real, enlivened by the context that gives them life and shape. One wonders why only one of these stories has been published before, and what’s likely to happen when this author shifts to a longer form that will allow his vision the breadth it really needs to develop and grow.

Accomplished and promising.

Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2003

ISBN: 0-14-200256-9

Page Count: 220

Publisher: Penguin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002

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THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

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

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SIGHTSEEING

STORIES

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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