“Nothing ventured, nothing gained” could be the unofficial motto of the sensitive young adults who inhabit Black’s...
Characters struggle to overcome their fears and fulfill their desires in a cautiously upbeat set of stories.
“Nothing ventured, nothing gained” could be the unofficial motto of the sensitive young adults who inhabit Black’s recognizable world. But often, they must be prodded to act. The opener, “That of Which We Cannot Speak,” sets the stage with its depiction of a divorced man trying to connect with an attractive physician at a New Year’s Eve party. Her laryngitis makes it impossible for her to speak, so they communicate via a clipboard she keeps around her neck. In the title story, a young woman conquers her jealousy over her boyfriend’s friendship with a beautiful writer with a sexy, win-win solution in which everyone gets what they want. “We’ve Got a Great Future Behind Us” introduces us to an estranged pair of well-known musicians who manage to come together one more time to write a good song about their train wreck of a marriage, and the suburban dad of “The Only Way Out Is Through” turns a family crisis, during a disastrous camping trip, into a last-ditch opportunity to bond with his troubled son. The toll of not taking action is tallied as well, when Elizabeth, the elder sister in “The Summer Before,” comes back to her family’s summer home after a years-long absence only to realize the ways in which she has not recovered from her parents' divorce. And in the mournful final episode, an aunt must face her own ambivalence toward commitment when her newly widowed sister asks her to sign on as emergency guardian for her young children. Although it could benefit from a bit more warmth toward its protagonists, this debut reads like a dream, with nary a false note. Well-balanced collection filled with low-key charm and notable talent.Pub Date: June 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-88603-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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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