Distinguished and disturbing work, from a lavishly gifted new writer.
Defrocked academics and football freaks, good ol’ boys and enticingly wicked women mingle to fine effect in Mississippian Vice’s impressively varied debut collection.
In a razor-sharp style studded with sparkling metaphors, Vice introduces a gallery of unhappy, embattled or just plain ornery southern souls. There’s the history student who finds in his overprotective father’s Russophilia both an objective correlative for his own ingrained timidity and a way to forgive and understand his dad (“Stalin”); the writer-teacher abandoned by his wife, and subject to panic attacks, whose paranoia is relieved by the druggy ministrations of a freewheeling Vicksburg beauty (“What Happens in the ’Burg, Stays in the ’Burg”); and the bereaved Greek-American mother who sublimates her grief by composing indigenous cookbooks (“Artifacts”). The author’s virtues as a regional realist are showcased in richly detailed portrayals of an aged black widower who “conjures” gardening success from the detritus of his happy family life (“Mojo Farmer”); a high-school athlete for whom Alabama football coach “Bear” Bryant’s “Spartan military discipline” is less threatening than his backbreaking everyday labors (“Report from Junction”); and a submissive retiree overmatched by his take-charge wife, her ebullient daughter and the coal-black studhorse that embodies the energies he cannot share with them (“Mule”). Even better is the sardonic title fantasy, about an automotive design engineer’s mischievous pet project; the seriocomic tale of a transplanted northerner’s flirtation with her absent husband’s golfing buddy, some draggletailed KKK troublemakers and ubiquitous lunatics escaped from the local asylum (“Tuscaloosa Knights”); and the chilling “Chickensnake,” in which a stoic farm boy apprehends how his family’s ill fortune is destroying its members, while also realizing that “he just couldn’t stop the world from eating itself.” The latter is a perfect little nightmare, worthy of Erskine Caldwell in his heyday.
Distinguished and disturbing work, from a lavishly gifted new writer.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2005
ISBN: 0-8203-2745-X
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
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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