A brilliant first collection of stories—many set in the historical past, and all concerning varieties of scientific pursuit and discovery—by the author of such well-received novels as The Middle Kingdom (1991) and The Forms of Water (1993). Barrett begins with a stunner: ``The Behavior of the Hawkweeds,'' about an unfulfilled faculty wife, her family's heritage of violence, and a telling incident in the life of the plant geneticist Gregor Mendel that impinged on the family's life and continues to cast long shadows over the woman's own psyche and marriage. The other six stories, all distinguished by a thoughtfully meditative tone and a firm focus on characters eager to analyze and understand their own natures, are almost uniformly rich and suggestive. ``Rare Bird'' describes the furtive rebellion of a gifted woman who, refusing to defer to her stolid brother's inferior intelligence, ingeniously escapes his—and their century's (the eighteenth's)—domination of women. ``Soroche'' relates a woman's progress through marriage, loss of husband and security, and toward fulfillment—ironically compared with the sad misadventures of ``Jemmy Button,'' the Tierra del Fuegan Indian uprooted from his culture and all but destroyed: It's a beautifully conceived tale, filled with mysterious grace notes and resonances. ``Birds with No Feet'' recounts the burning away of a young zoologist's illusions when he finds in Darwin's theory of evolution a mocking, yet strangely comforting explanation of his own character and fortunes. And the title novella, about a young Canadian doctor's existential adventure ministering to typhus- stricken Irish immigrants, re-creates with astonishing conviction a vanished time and place, and memorably examines both the despair and the moral courage of people who believe they can do no more, and no less, than, simply, what is right. Marvelous stories, unlike any being written today, by a writer whose continuing growth may well be one of the most interesting literary developments of the '90s.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-393-03853-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
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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