If one of these doesn’t engage you, it’ll only be a minute before you can proceed to the next.
A writer of eclectic novels, stories and poems turns playful with this short collection of “flash fiction.”
A professor of creative writing (Ron Carlson Writes a Story, 2007, etc.) who is best known for his mastery of longer-form fiction, Carlson here turns his attention to the much shorter form. Not short like Lydia Davis, but few of these stories are longer than a couple of pages, a few are poems, and some seem mainly to be exercises in postmodern narrative strategy. The opening, “You Must Intercept the Blue Box before It Gets to the City,” for example, uses the imperative mode, as if addressing the reader (“Get that box!” it starts). Yet the “you” who is implied early on and subsequently addressed directly eventually develops into a character who, though unnamed, is definitely someone other than the reader: “You admire your nephew, he’s in the top rank of the institute, but you don’t love him. He’s annoying and smug and expresses so many things in decimals.” The collection is divided into four parts, with the second being the funniest and least conventional in terms of storytelling. Most of these pieces involve the academic world, and three in a row are letters of recommendation: one for a student who is apparently living in his car outside the professor’s house, another for one who consistently sleeps through class (“a personable, extremely polite young lady who would fit well in any graduate school environment”) and the third for “that rare thing: the ideal student” who makes no trouble because he's dead. The last section would seem to be spooky stories about teenagers, longer than most of the earlier ones, with titles such as “Horror Story at Lonely Lake” and “Teenagers Are Going Overnight to the Island without Supervision!,” with something close to a plot and named characters, though one of them (“We Went Up to Quencher’s Point”) has an abrupt disconnect in the middle.
If one of these doesn’t engage you, it’ll only be a minute before you can proceed to the next.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59709-275-3
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
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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