This slim volume offers quirky, quick stories that should appeal to those looking for a spiritual guide.
A collection delivers short stories with a Christian bent.
Mitchley (Breaking Through, 2008) describes the volume’s offerings, mostly biblical allegories and parables, as “shock stories,” and they usually end with an ironic twist or a lesson. The collection is slim; the longest of the 10 stories comes in at 13 pages. The opener, “Having it Out With Myself,” enacts an angry encounter between a man and his neighbor. “Old Abe” leads to a sort of spiritual reconciliation; “Pride” is a parable about a proud man trying to get into heaven with a proverbial ending. “Paranoid Master” imagines the next 50 years of American life with nature upturned by scientific meddling run rampant. The title story relates a prison interview and the confessions of an envious man, while “Counterfeit Salvation” tells of a preacher working undercover at a dive bar in order to save the clientele. The penultimate story, “Destiny,” tells of “a surreal way of producing honey” that comes out of a son’s death. “The Strap,” “Mailboxes,” “ ’66 Dodge Coronet,” and “Gravity of Life” are all shorter sketches of a more personal nature, each ending with its own edifying message. These stories have a feeling of surrealism that is common in parables, using the difference between the expected and the reality of the tale to explain the contemporary world and its spiritual problems. Without the tether of realism, though, the writing is often didactic and simple, and the plotting can feel rushed—many of the stories end with the narrator telling the reader exactly what to take from the tale. Mitchley’s framing in some of the works is unique, such as “Destiny,” which is narrated by a reporter recording a podcast. But it can sometimes be hard to know who is telling a story at any one time, especially in “Paranoid Master.” The morals of Mitchley’s tales will likely land differently for readers, depending on their faith—for some, they will be reassuring and enlightening, but for many secular readers, the lessons will seem overly familiar.
This slim volume offers quirky, quick stories that should appeal to those looking for a spiritual guide.Pub Date: May 22, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61862-263-1
Page Count: 76
Publisher: Tate
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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