At his (frequent, though inconsistent) best, this is one of our better storytellers. It’s about time for a Ron Carlson...
The agonies of adolescence and the moral confusions of adulthood and middle age are observed with finely honed wit in this entertaining fourth collection from the Arizona author of Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1977) and Plan B for the Middle Class (1992).
There are two brief interludes, one a wry explanation of how real life gets fictionalized, the other a teenager’s imaginary romantic personals ad: they echo each other, but their linkage is not otherwise explored. The nine fully developed stories, as varied and uneven a lot as are the contents of its three predecessors, uniformly employ a witty, knowing (usually first-person) narrative voice and a tangy colloquial style that often bursts into authentic comic aphorism (e.g., “It was a bit like being in the army: when in doubt, paint something”). A few stories fall flat: “The Clicker at Tips,” about a nowhere relationship played out in a bar whose patrons watch Monday-night football, and “Gary Garrison’s Wedding Vows,” about the love life of a woman led by her inchoate “feelings,” seem especially lame. But when Carlson creates a protagonist with an original relationship to his milieu and circumstances, he can dazzle. The title story’s rich portrayal of a conflicted sport fisherman’s experiences with his current woman and with a man formerly encountered in extreme circumstances, and thereafter unforgotten, expertly jumbles various marital, parental, and sexual “feelings” together. In “Towel Season” and “The Potato Gun,” timid, passive family men are shaken into riskier, hence more fulfilling—and threatening—behavior. And Carlson’s at his best in “Evil Eye Allen,” a dippy anti-romance about high school hormonal mischief and homespun Satanism, and especially, “The Ordinary Son,” a delightful tale of growing up among—and away from—a family of Texan geniuses, including a NASA physicist, a save-the-planet poet, and a girl who calls herself “Isotope.”
At his (frequent, though inconsistent) best, this is one of our better storytellers. It’s about time for a Ron Carlson Selected Stories.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28605-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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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