A pleasurable, if at times too tenuous, examination of hardscrabble lives and hapless dreams.
This debut collection of 17 linked stories examines, often comically, the slow demise of a Pennsylvania coal town.
Sandwiched between 1949 and 1994, the stories cover multiple families related by marriage or friendship or disaster, as the inhabitants of Cokesville drag their sorrows from one decade to the next. The center of the collection lies with Annie Kusiak and her best friend, Tess Randall, who are either featured or know the characters in each tale. In “Hocus Pocus,” Theodore Cheslock is “the most miserable man in Cokesville.” And the reason for his gloom? A not-so-simple case of existential ennui, the disillusionment of knowing that every day will be the same as the last. Out for a drink on his 45th birthday, he happily disappears, thanks to the work of a magician. Theodore isn’t seen again for 21 years, when he reappears three stories later in “Congratulations, Goldie Katowitz” as an old man, teenaged Annie’s long-lost grandfather now dottily brought home to roost with his recent lottery winnings. Annie goes to college, drops out, attempts suicide and tries to reconnect with her ex-boyfriend in “Annie Kusiak’s Meaning of Life”; though only 19, poor Annie’s life doesn’t improve much in subsequent stories. Tess becomes a star for a moment in Hollywood, then a soap-opera diva, then something on the fringe, until she finally becomes a producer, when the son she adopted long ago comes calling in “Now You Don’t.” The best in the collection is “Mrs. Szewczak and the Rescue Dog.” Stranded at a bus stop during a blizzard, hoping the emergency Rescue Dog car finds her before she dies of hypothermia, old Mrs. Szewczak takes a ride offered by two pot-smoking black men, and what ensues is both hopeful and a bit tragic.
A pleasurable, if at times too tenuous, examination of hardscrabble lives and hapless dreams.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-22330-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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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