The plots may be familiar, but the sensibility is refreshingly different. A voice coming into its own.
Eleven stories tackle the entanglements of young love and marriage, in a second collection by Flannery O’Connor Award–winning from Brady (The End of the Class War, 1999).
Wandering his neighborhood in search of evidence about the accident that injured him, the Vicodin-anesthetized whiplash victim of “Side by Side” feels an attraction that animates all these tales: “The lit windows, tantalizing behind drawn curtains, beckon him, and on those rare occasions when he passes an uncurtained window, he slows to seize this glimpse through a peephole into another world.” More often than not, this other world is tinged by the residues of lingering traumas, small and large. In “The Loss of Green,” a woman’s former lover reappears to test her fidelity to a new life and marriage that, so far, have only produced a miscarriage. A limo driver in “Comfort” considers the nature of luxury and suffering as a ride turns sour and he becomes an unlikely knight to the rescue. The Zoetrope award-winning “Curled in the Bed of Love” is a dull story about (sigh) love in the time of AIDS, while “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is an episodic ramble through a woman’s two marriages and two children, posing as its ultimate issue the question of whether she will grant redemption to the husband who slipped into addiction. Another redemption is sought by the hairdresser in “Behold the Handmaid of the Lord,” who takes the cousin she betrayed on a national talk show to ask for forgiveness—but is a true apology possible anymore? Bordering on the sentimental, but often experimental enough to avoid it, Brady’s stories wrap all the old questions in new packaging: live, crisp prose and characters who genuinely seem to feel.
The plots may be familiar, but the sensibility is refreshingly different. A voice coming into its own.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2003
ISBN: 0-8203-2545-7
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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