An uneven collection of 15 new or recent stories from the midwestern novelist and storywriter (The Gasoline Wars, 1979; Little Face, 1984). The pieces are grouped arbitrarily, under the rubrics “Who We Love,” “Other Lives,” and “Spirits,” though in fact there’s considerable overlapping. Mostly, they feature ordinary people attempting to dream their way out of limiting or depressing lives (in “Heart of Gold,” a woman takes comfort from the warm masculine presences of movie cowboy heroes and of a helpful “garage man,” while “Poor Helen” escapes marital and maternal disappointments by bar hopping). The bored suburbanite of “Fire Dreams” shakes herself alive by dallying with a married fireman; and the “reformed hippie” of “Mother Nature” attempts, under the watchful gaze of her disapproving teenaged daughter, to reconnect with an old friend from her wild youth. Capably written, all of these, intermittently enlivened by wry dialogue, are ever so slightly predictable. A few stories develop from arresting premises, notably “The Lost Child” (which seems to portray a kidnaping in progress) and “Forever,” about a reporter who interviews the family and boyfriend of a murdered girl only to stumble into a sharpened awareness of his own mortality (—He was only one of the dead who were not yet dead—). Thompson’s unpretentious clarity pays off most rewardingly in stories that expose their characters gradually to the unforeseen consequences of their actions. Standouts are “The Amish,” in which the aroused consciousness of an embittered Vietnam vet slowly estranges him from his family, and “The Widower,” its elderly antagonist virtually haunting the house he sells to a younger couple, who find his solitude and misery seeping into, and poisoning, their lives. Honest, competent work from a good writer who’s at her best when she avoids formulaic situations and takes us inside her characters” painstaking explorations of themselves and whomever they love, or think they love.
Pub Date: June 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-15-100416-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
