Smart and technically accomplished fiction that is sometimes a bit too self-consciously artful.
Past traumas bleed into present experiences in Lippmann’s stark, occasionally enigmatic debut collection.
A divorced slacker dad, good in his teenage son’s eyes only for beer runs and his not-too-attentive chaperonage of a ski trip, remains haunted by the car crash that killed his best friend (“The Last Resort”). Ten years after her toddler brother fell into an empty swimming pool and died before her eyes, the narrator of “Everyone Has Your Best Interests at Heart” is still punishing herself, listlessly going through the motions in a dead-end summer job, with no plans now that she’s graduated high school, and taking up with the vaguely creepy host of a reptile show. Parenthood only brings more woe; in both “Jew” and “All This Happiness,” thoughts of their terminally ill babies shadow the protagonists’ actions. The settled moms of “Body Scan” and “Reunion” seem nostalgic for their wild, pre-kid days, while the embittered divorcée of “Doll Palace” says of her once-adored ex, “[e]veryone falls short in real life.” Lippmann writes well about damaged lives and ambivalent relationships, and she displays a knack for crafting mildly surreal scenarios that reveal the characters’ fragile emotional states (“Starter Home,” “Talisman”). She also has a weakness for abruptly ringing down the curtain on her stories with jarring developments left ostentatiously unexplained (“The Best of Us,” “Queen of Hearts,” “Babydollz”). This taste for obfuscation is balanced by sharp observations of the social landscape: The mother crankily guiding two girls through endless lines at Doll Palace, the “overpriced and unopposed retailer of all things doll,” or the restless wife attending the funeral of a high school boyfriend, passing “identical stucco townhomes with plastic play yards out front where apparently half of the entire class lived and screwed each other and worked to make ends meet.”
Smart and technically accomplished fiction that is sometimes a bit too self-consciously artful.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9910657-1-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Dock Street Press
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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