When Beattie is this good, she’s essential reading. When she isn’t, it’s the usual mixed bag.
Beattie’s seventh collection explores middle age and generational conflict in an edgy novella and nine stories of varying intensity and excellence.
The novella (“Flechette Follies”) depicts the fallout from a fender-bender involving middle-aged Charlottesville divorcée Nancy Gregerson and out-of-towner George Wissone. Beattie gradually fills us in on each character’s thwarted life: Nancy’s demanding job as an old-people’s home nurse and estrangement from her compulsive screw-up adult son, and George’s relationship-destroying employment in a covert government operation (“the rescue of rich Americans who got themselves in trouble” overseas). The novella form suits Beattie’s practice of defining characters through their relationships, habits and possessions—and when Nancy hires Wissone to find her missing son, the story branches out in several tense and revelatory directions. The briefer tales are decidedly mixed. Forced zaniness yields middling results in a male college student’s account of his employment by an eccentric professor with a mother who probably went to school with Auntie Mame (“Duchais”) and a solitary woman writer’s ditsy “Apology for a Journey Not Taken: How to Write a Story.” The latter figure appears variously, as an adult recalling “The Garden Game” of childhood visits to relatives that soothed the pain of her parents’ separation; as a Roman tourist, sublimating an unwanted family obligation into a fantasized romance (“Mostre”); and in a memorable tale (“The Rabbit Hole as Likely Explanation”) of its middle-aged narrator’s dealings with her elderly mother’s snappish temper and wandering mind (a beauty of a story, featuring a delicate blend of black-comic dialogue and restrained sentiment). Best is “That Last Odd Day in L.A.,” as lived by an aging man separated from loved ones by “ his sarcasm and his comic asides and his endless equivocating,” redeemed by his searching intelligence and generous imagination.
When Beattie is this good, she’s essential reading. When she isn’t, it’s the usual mixed bag.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6961-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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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