Black is at his best as a social realist in a blue-collar milieu; elsewhere, the strain shows.
It used to be Pennsylvania coal country, and even now that the mining jobs have gone, many in Black’s first story collection find it hard to leave.
The narrator of "Wildcats" and his buddy R.J. are typical. The high school students waste their energy skirmishing with older guys drilling for oil. R.J. will end up a solitary woodsman, the narrator, a third-generation farm manager. His fatalistic counterpart in "It Burns" seems college-bound but disappoints his more ambitious girlfriend by hanging out with a troublemaker whose ex-miner dad is dying of cancer. Further back in time, the fact-based "Susquehanna, 1960" explores the aftermath of a flooding river and mine cave-in which killed dozens and left a community of Poles and Italians without work. Young Joe Kovalevsky has a ruined leg. An older miner, Rora, suggests they build a boat, a modest way of restoring the balance between man and nature. Rora’s fatherly concern for Joe gives the story a glow, making it the standout. Black is less successful with higher income brackets. "Leaving" is the portrait of a tenured academic who's left two women after detaching them from their previous guys and will in time dump his current girlfriend, leading him to the banal conclusion that we are all alone. In "Architecture," retiring lawyer Mark and his wife, Elizabeth, have decided to stay put in their coal-belt city because of its gentrifying downtown. The story plays with an irony. Elizabeth loves the city’s grand old structures, yet the story has no corresponding structure. In a postmodern moment, the narrator jumps in to urge the importance of elegant narrative design and then, before withdrawing, points to an unscripted dead body that contradicts his message. It’s a bit of mischief that doesn’t quite work.
Black is at his best as a social realist in a blue-collar milieu; elsewhere, the strain shows.Pub Date: April 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8023-1359-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dufour
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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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