Well-crafted works of fiction full of arresting images, insightful descriptions, and emotional resonance.
A collection of 11 previously published short stories, many of which portray failing relationships.
Parrett (Montana Americana Music, 2016, etc.) opens with the masterful, deeply affecting “Side of the Road,” in which an unnamed narrator recounts his troubling interactions with his abusive, alcoholic father. The latter eventually finds work removing detritus from the roadways of Montana. An early scene involves a dead moose and demonstrates Parrett’s skill with sensory detail: “The blood was frosting over on the highway when we got there, but it was still sticky enough to coat my boots like paint. I left red prints, one foot in front of the other, on top of the white shoulder stripe as the two of them gutted the carcass.” Purposeful ambiguity is another evocative feature of Parrett’s style; for example, the aforementioned narrator reveals that he was 19 when he last saw his parents but not why he never saw them again. Consequently, later goodbyes are heart-wrenching in their simplicity, and what the narrator does with an object that his father gives him effectively brings the story full circle. By contrast, the title character in “Evelyn’s Footprints” has a childhood full of wonder and discovery, anchored by a tender rapport with her widowed father, although the tale’s ending is similarly ambiguous. Other standouts include the raw “The Stars Threw Down Their Spears,” in which a woman blames her boyfriend for her dog’s gruesome death, and the contemplative “Thirteen Things I Have Sold on EBay,” which neatly captures the pathos of an ended marriage. As an added bonus, debut illustrator Roby offers images of wood engravings that visually support each story. If there’s a drawback to this collection, it’s that a few entries don’t pack enough of a punch. For instance, “Sicilian Defense” uses chess as a metaphor for power relations between partners Nathan and Jared, but the bellicose, territorial language used to describe a sex act seems forced, and a final utterance of “Checkmate” is predictable and unnecessary.
Well-crafted works of fiction full of arresting images, insightful descriptions, and emotional resonance.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9976006-3-6
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Territorial Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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