Admirable in its broad sweep of Mason’s estimable career as a writer and likely as good a gathering as there could be—if,...
A sturdy introduction to the multifaceted work of Kentucky laureate Mason (Nancy Culpepper: Stories, 2006, etc.).
People are always going places they don’t want to go in Mason’s tales. In her lovely novel In Country, it’s a mother traveling, much against her will at first, with her granddaughter and her son’s best friend to the wall in Washington to reckon with the death of her boy in Vietnam: “Mamaw lets loose a stream as loud as a cow’s. This trip is crazy. It reminds Sam of that Chevy Chase movie about a family on vacation, with an old woman tagging along.” In “Shiloh,” the 1982 story that announced Mason’s arrival on the literary scene, it’s a reluctant wife finally giving in to her mother-in-law’s demand that she visit the Tennessee battlefield, where her husband learns that he’s been missing a big part of their story: “History was always just names and dates to him….And the real inner workings of a marriage, like most of history, have escaped him.” Of course, sometimes people do go places they mean to: There’s Paducah, Kentucky, for instance, “a provincial town with a funny name, but here in the western end of the state it was never an inconsequential place.” Whether story or novel, essay or review, Mason’s work is characterized by closely realized detail, sympathy with the players involved, and, usually, sharp but good-natured humor: When a Kentucky girl decides to take a year off from school in the story “Bumblebees” and head off to exotic Lexington, she says, “Look, think of this as junior year abroad, O.K.? Except I won’t be speaking French.” Mason’s reader-friendly appreciation of Mark Twain, a writer she much resembles, also rings absolutely true: “He’s very contemporary, I think, because in his time he saw so far ahead, as if he were looking right at us.”
Admirable in its broad sweep of Mason’s estimable career as a writer and likely as good a gathering as there could be—if, for a fan, too short.Pub Date: June 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8131-7545-4
Page Count: 478
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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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