A second collection from Kirschenbaum (after Married Life, 1990): l6 stories, some of which have previously appeared in magazines like Outerbridge and the Indiana Review, that self- consciously chronicle female city-sophisticates' quests for identity and meaning. With one exception, the pieces here, though often bearing significant titles—``History on a Personal Note,'' ``The Zen of Driving,'' ``Get Married, Get Divorced, Find Jesus''—and equally weighty intentions, are shallow reflections of PC orthodoxy. The title story, as it moves from 1984 Germany—East and West—to rural Virginia, chronicles the failed romance of Lorraine, an American, with Peter, a German travel operative, and offers glib opinions on US politics and European history. Lorraine reappears when, back home in Virginia, she marries Doc, a stereotypical redneck whose crudeness serves (in ``Halfway to Farmville'' and ``Rural Delivery'') to illustrate the finer sensibilities of the urban narrator and the horrors of poor Lorraine's sojourn in the benighted South. ``Get Married, Get Divorced, Find Jesus'' describes the quirky relationship between Harold, who seems to know everything, and Nadia, who ``prefers to think things are as they are not''; and ``The Zen of Driving'' tells of a woman, unfaithful to her husband, who fantasizes about different cars while learning to drive in the city. ``White Houses'' reflects on a suburban childhood during the Kennedy years as a way of making a commentary on racial and religious prejudice. The best story here, meanwhile, is ``Courtship,'' which movingly describes the narrator's parents' ``wondrous love'' for each other while ruefully acknowledging ``that for me, such a love would never be enough.'' The kind of narrowly focused writing that declares sophistication but, in its way, is as parochial as any.
Pub Date: April 12, 1995
ISBN: 0-88064-169-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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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