Dawson (The Waking Spell, 1992) masterfully incorporates her central Texas characters into a magical, multigenerational, utterly mesmerizing struggle between good and evil. Back in the early 1920s, Grant Macafee's attraction to Sarah Ransom wasn't love, but a terrible sickness—that's what 500-pound recluse Victoria Ransom's old servant, Viola, tells her with absolute conviction. It was a passion that overwhelmed the sticklike body of the young Grant as he attended parties at the Ransoms' limestone mansion, a house paid for by the phenomenally successful ice business run by Sarah's and Grant's fathers. Entwined though the two families were through business concerns, Sarah refused to marry Grant, consenting only to an affair with him—until, pregnant, she fled her home, never to return. Enraged, Grant impulsively married the woman coveted by Sarah's amiable brother, William—but was humiliated a second time when his wife gave birth to William's child. Grant's fury extended to the entire Ransom family, and in his subsequent isolation it grew to an unalloyed reservoir of evil intent. As the decades passed, Ransoms began regularly to disappear or fall down dead, and the servant Viola begged William to destroy Grant and free the family from his curse. Gently reared William's equivocation in the face of such evil mirrored his country's contemporaneous waffling as Hitler's forces spread across Europe. A believer in the power of his own goodness, William was forced to witness much more—his eldest son's mysterious death, his grieving sister's collapse, his second son's murder—before he understood that the forces of evil had already won. It is William's granddaughter Victoria (the youngest and the largest of all the Ransoms) who, by writing down every monstrous detail Viola has told her, manages to defeat the demons and thereby free her own imprisoned soul as well. This hallucinatory tale grips the reader with its gothic undertones while seriously exploring the complexities of the human soul. Once again, Dawson proves herself an astonishingly accomplished novelist very early in her career. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-56512-054-X
Page Count: 476
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1994
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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