Breezy first collection, with some potential.
Jaunty tales about traditional female goals of family and fulfillment, told in brash, nontraditional scenarios.
Women on the verge of something, anything, all diligently seek the missing piece—be it memento, baby, husband, or coveted tickets to Princess Di’s mansion, conveniently discovered on a dead man’s coffee table. Readable and fast-paced, sprinkled with lit school in-jokes, these 11 coming-of-age tales—from various stages of life—wander through the events and introspections of people desperately seeking to be less alone. Voicey newcomer Goldner sets up situation comedy esoterically. Bravado can sometimes overwhelm her characters, like the “Farm Wife” who, after observing her sister’s widowhood (her husband was struck down by lightning in the cantaloupe patch), wants only to be a wife of somebody, whether “a Doctor’s Wife, a Lawyer’s Wife, a Bus Driver’s Wife, an Underemployed Alcoholic’s Wife, a Trophy Wife,” or whatever, so long as she’s a wife. The route to wifehood is half chick-lit farce, half social commentary: “He married me because I can do just about anything with an egg.” Or “Taxi Dancer,” the story of an unhinged, mean-spirited grad student who mournfully discovers that her pathetic sugar-daddy has finally found legitimate love—with an unpaid-for woman. In “Waxing,” the brazenness of the toenail-painting, dominatrix-waxing, nipple-hair-nabbing heroine is complicated by an unshakable bourgeois fear of welfare moms. There are quieter stories, too. A male protagonist, wistfully observing his daughter’s unplanned pregnancy, reflects back on his own experience. And a teenager remembers the summer her father left home. Stalled by simplistic science-versus-God talk, “Deep Down to the Bottom of This” nevertheless presents one of the more interesting situations: over breakfast, a dying woman handpicks and encourages her husband’s young colleague eventually to take her place, saying simply, “You know Nigel. And maybe you will know Nigel more.”
Breezy first collection, with some potential.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-58243-269-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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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