An intriguing, if uneven, collection of stories from a writer with potential.
Singh’s debut short story collection explores the intricacies of human emotion among everyday people.
This set of 13 stories, split into two sections, ranges from a tale about the seemingly mundane aggravation of waiting for home repair to stories of karma tales and supernatural visits from beyond the grave. Despite its outwardly disparate parts, Singh’s pieces are connected by the theme of a group of characters desperately fighting to escape their current circumstances, assert their self-worth or battle their base inner demons. There are no real happy endings here, and more than a few stories tend toward the macabre. The most successful pieces, however, contain flashes of real beauty. For example, in “The Only Absolute Relief,” the author captures the exquisite pain of a person yearning for a better life and the crushing emptiness after he realizes that the dream wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. The collection abounds with flawed, achingly human, deftly drawn characters. Many of them are, through no fault of their own, cast out, down on their luck and seeking redemption. Few receive it. The stories do suffer at times from a somewhat heavy hand; some readers may find its long, run-on sentences distracting or discouraging. The stories in the book’s second section, most 10 pages or fewer in length, seem underdeveloped compared to those in the first, and despite intriguing storylines and robust characters, they often lack depth and resolve too quickly. The last piece, “Chief Flightless Bird,” for example, about a disabled, married man, starts off strong with genuine feeling but, at just over four pages long, doesn’t have the time to develop into the powerful ending needed for this collection.
An intriguing, if uneven, collection of stories from a writer with potential.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1479270989
Page Count: 188
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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