Next book

CLOSE RANGE

WYOMING STORIES

A vigorous second collection from Proulx (after Heart Songs and Other Stories, 1988): eleven nicely varied stories set in the roughhewn wasteland that one narrator calls a “97,000-square-miles dog’s breakfast of outside exploiters, Republican ranchers and scenery.” The characters here are windburned, fatalistic westerners stuck in the harsh lives they’ve made for themselves in this bitter demi-paradise. They include: hardworking, luckless ranchers (in the painfully concise “Job History,” and the sprawling “Pair a Spurs,” the latter a wry tale of divorce, sexual urgency, and sheer cussedness that bears fleeting resemblances to Proulx’s Accordion Crimes); aging hellion Josanna Skiles (of “A Lonely Coast”) and the lover who can neither tame her nor submit to her; a sagebrush Bluebeard and his inquisitive wife (in the amusingly fragmentary “55 Miles to the Gas Pump”); and an itinerant rodeo cowboy (in “The Mud Below”) whose vagrant spirit stubbornly kicks against memories of his disastrous childhood. Two stories are, effectively, miniature novels: “People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water,” about memorably dysfunctional feuding families; and “The Bunchgrass Edge of the World,” which begins as a collection of random eccentricities, then coheres into a grimly funny parody of the family saga. “The Blood Bay” retells a familiar western folktale, adding just a whiff of Chaucer’s “Pardoner’s Tale.” And two prizewinning pieces brilliantly display Proulx’s trademark whipsaw wit and raw, lusty language. “The Half-Skinned Steer” wrests a rich portrayal of the experience of unbelonging from the account of an old man’s journey westward, for his brother’s funeral, back to the embattled home he’d spent decades escaping. And the powerful “Brokeback Mountain” explores with plangent understated compassion the lifelong sexual love between two cowboys destined for separation, and the harsh truth that “if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.” Gritty, authoritative stories of loving, losing, and bearing the consequences. Nobody else writes like this, and Proulx has never written better.

Pub Date: May 10, 1999

ISBN: 0-684-85221-7

Page Count: 285

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999

Categories:
Next book

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

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

Categories:
Next book

SIGHTSEEING

STORIES

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

Close Quickview