A debut collection weaves several narratives into one richly defined (if oddly static) tapestry portraying the history and obsessions of a troubled Jewish intellectual family. Ruth Klingle, the narrator, stands at the center of most of the ten pieces here. A young mother who grew up in suburban New Jersey, she is married to her old high-school headmastera vicious Dickensian bigot who in his fits of rage and paranoid racism isn't able to show us what could have attracted Ruth to him in the first place. We learn early on that Ruth's father molested her on a regular basis throughout her childhood, and that her mother learned of this many years later, to her great consternation and chagrin. Ruth's own feelings about it are submerged and surface only obliquely, mainly in response to her husband's perpetual rantings against the left-wing politics of her family. ``It was true, I thought: liberals are irresponsible, self-indulgent people. I would no longer be like them, no longer be the daughter of those Jews who marched and sang.'' Motive and explanation, however, are not part of the economy of these tales, which seem to be extended exercises in portraitureprecise, restrained, and ultimately rather precious (``His appendix burst slowly, almost gracefully....He had felt it: the rush of liquids, then the onslaught of life, which is pain''). There is a real skill present in the interweaving of one piece with another, all of them interrelated as evidently and problematically as the members of Ruth's family, although the narrative that emergesrevolving around incest, genocide, madness, and homosexualityis somehow dragged down by the heaviness of the prose and the intricacy of the descriptions. An overly ambitious start from a talented beginner.
Pub Date: Aug. 31, 1995
ISBN: 1-882413-19-9
Page Count: 168
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
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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