Comforting as cocoa, a heartfelt first novel inspired by the letters and poems of Wright’s own late grandfather.
A grandfather’s legacy to his troubled family.
Harry Whitney has been told that he has Alzheimer’s—and he knows it’s only a matter of time until his mind will go. His two children are grown, and his beloved wife Kathryn died many years ago. Harry spends as much time as he can with his six-year-old granddaughter Emily, whose mother Laura brings her to visit every Friday. His son Bob, a self-absorbed pharmaceutical rep, plans to relocate to San Diego and divorce Laura for no particularly compelling reason. Bob’s just not happy, that’s all. Laura is perplexed. Does anyone besides her care about the old man’s welfare? His daughter Michelle visits only at Christmas: Her husband Greg is controlling and cold, and their children hardly know their grandfather. But Harry soldiers on, working in his garden when he can and writing in secret—poems, letters, advice, mostly to Emily—in a futile effort to stay sane. Still, his behavior changes, the signs of impending derangement all too clear. Then, before his well-meaning family can put him into a nursing home, Harry dies peacefully. Laura and Bob sort through his belongings and find a hand-bound book of poems. The rhymes are odd, but it’s plain that the old man was trying to tell them something. Once they figure out the simple code (usually concerning the first letters of significant words in each poem), they can access his computer files with the password given—and there they find his letters to Emily, filled with homespun anecdotes, heretofore unknown family history, and words of love. Harry also left other clues: there may be treasure hidden somewhere in the house. Greg and Bob rent a metal detector, and the treasure turns out to be infinitely more valuable than anyone expected. Reconciliation, inner peace, and tears of happy joy await all.
Comforting as cocoa, a heartfelt first novel inspired by the letters and poems of Wright’s own late grandfather.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7434-4446-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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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