Emotionally resonant stories for readers who feel wistful and unsatisfied with their pasts, surely a universal experience.
Lockhart’s (Elizabeth’s Field, 2015, etc.) collection of short literary fiction offers a series of character studies.
The 16 stories in this book follow folks in a small town in Maryland called Puckum and the surrounding rural area. The tone is set with the first story, “Beginning with Puckum,” which finds Christmas angels detaching themselves from lampposts on Main Street and sweeping across the landscape, wistful for what they once were and searching for reminders. That symbolism becomes more real in the stories that follow—a grandmother trying to keep her recollections of her family together, a couple tending to a farm and using each other for an uneasy stability, a widow confronted by memories bringing a bag of her son’s clothes to donate to a secondhand store. Most everyone in these stories has lost something. The characters have gone through divorce, watched loved ones die, or come to the sudden realization that the ideal life they’d hoped for isn’t going to happen. The landscape plays a part in enhancing this feeling of loss and nostalgia. Most of the shops downtown have left, replaced by thrift stores in “The Fox Fling.” “The Puckum Family Restaurant” is a classic diner where everyone has a well-established routine. The author imbues her character studies with impressive depth and insight. She has a knack for delivering a lot of detail in a sentence or two. The first paragraph of the final story, “Inside Out,” is a pitch-perfect setup: “He was serious, standing there with his hands in his pockets, his shirt pressed, shorts belted, clear, blue eyes peering down at me, and me, sixteen years older, looking off to the trees, trying to come up with an answer, annoyed at his impertinence.” The two major characters are introduced so the reader can see them and also feel the female narrator’s disposition. She ends up somewhere quite different from her attitude in the first paragraph, finding comfort in her uncertainty, at ease not knowing what might happen next but happy for the familiar things that surround her. And that’s also the note on which the collection ends, paralleling the arc from the opening story.
Emotionally resonant stories for readers who feel wistful and unsatisfied with their pasts, surely a universal experience.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-944962-27-2
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Secant Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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