An undistinguished debut collection that somehow lacks the resonance needed to transform the ordinary into the enchanting. Granted, Griffin does manage to stay far from the weary tale of the eccentric southerner. Though all the pieces are set in Tennessee, it's atmosphere that the region supplies, not oddities. Some of the more memorable tales focus on growing up during the Vietnam War, such as ``Home for the Weekend,'' in which a young boy watches as disaster grows from a small event: His college brother brings home a fellow student, from Nigeria, taking him to church on Sunday and causing a lethal upheaval in the still segregated community. While speculating on what it would be like to take a gunboat up the Mekong River, the narrator finds that he's being called on to confront a more subtle war at home. The longest and most effective story, ``The Courtship of Dixie Pepper,'' tracks the bad to worse luck of Hal, an out-of-work, kicked-out-of-house fellow whose good intentions usually go awry. Refused the hand of the stunning Dixie Pepper by her old-fashioned father, the still- shiftless Hal finds himself 20 years later in the midst of sexy, though unfounded, rumors involving himself and the now wealthy and still beautiful Dixie. A lively tale, balancing a number of droll subplots, it succeeds in charming the reader with well-drawn detail and humor. ``Big Ash,'' which like all the stories touches on some aspect of the effects of Vietnam, tells the sad tale of Karlen, who is literally falling apart bit by bit, very likely because of his exposure to Agent Orange. The prodigious sufferer remains movingly quixotic right to the end. There's ambition here, and a lively imagination, but many of the stories remain unsurprising. A competent first collection, but not a grand entrance.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1997
ISBN: 1-889330-05-1
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
