Dark stories, sometimes downright murky.
Uneven first collection, another Flannery O’Connor Award winner (see Fincke, above): ten stories about underachievers, losers, and girls “endlessly seeking security.”
In the strongest piece, “Rabbit Punch,” a bipolar Virginia Woolf scholar recognizes a teenaged boy whose face is in the morning paper for committing a sensational crime. She’d been his babysitter years before, at a time when she was taking medication after being fired from a teaching job, drinking too much, sleeping too little and painting trompe l’oeil murals on the walls of her apartment. He was an out-of-control nine-year-old. Even his parents disliked him, but, in a small way, she’d found a way to connect, if not to like him. Now his potential for violence has been realized. The vaguely comic “The Rest of Esther” is about a naïve girl in the development department of a seminary who’s sent to convince a nonagenarian to leave her millions to the institution—and instead influences the legacy in ways none could have predicted. In the sketchy “Maybe, Maybe Not,” a woman has just married the boy next door from 31 years before, discovering that each recalls a pie-throwing incident as a most vivid childhood memory. Too often, Sutton’s stories are just unclear. The title story opens: “The afternoon’s snow still had the lift of an infant’s blanket—or teased hair, maybe a spongy Orlon sweater, the bed of cotton under jewelry. Jewelry. The girl couldn’t even think the word jewelry anymore without feeling the lot of the hopelessly cheap crawl into bed with her, every last scallop of ‘let’s pretend’—let’s pretend at midnight trysts, at cabs from here to there, at ocelot clutch bags with their own matching lighters.” On the next page, we learn that the narrator was once a gofer for a jeweler (as in “Send the girl”), and the story is about the scrapes she got into working at various jobs, including as secretary to a man with an unhappy marriage.
Dark stories, sometimes downright murky.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8203-2655-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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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