A collection as eerily hard to sound as are its characters, heartfelt yet with plenty of puzzling white space.
A series of nine loosely related, fairly bland debut stories about a southwestern Pennsylvania town and its mild-mannered inhabitants.
In a prologue, Tudish describes how Tenney’s Landing was founded: fur trappers and veterans of the French and Indian War established Fort Duquesne around 1765, upriver on the Monongahela, where the town of Pittsburgh grew. Eventually, nearby Tenney’s Landing became a thriving place, later declared a historic site. In the stories, Tudish visits the current denizens of Tenney’s Landing, with a tone that moves between sentiment and edge. In “Dog Stories,” a young native returns from college in Ann Arbor and learns about the marriage of a handyman, Eugene Eastman, whom she remembers keenly from the summer she turned 11 (“One of the good things about Eugene: he wasn’t going anywhere”). Eugene was the hayseed foil to the girl’s parents’ marriage problems that summer, when the narrator’s professor father, John, left home to live with a McClelland College student he’d fallen in love with, and Eugene appeared every day at the grieving house to help with yard and garden work. In “Pigeon,” long-time native Aggie Moffat hears that her retired husband of many decades, Jasper, is flirting with an elderly widow in another town. Aggie follows him and learns that it’s true, and yet her own indifference, and his wanderlust, were always evident right in front of her, and she’d managed to surmount her own need for a life of her own. In the first story, “Where the Devil Lost His Blanket,” a well-to-do local woman, wife and mother, Elizabeth Tenney, has been selected by her dying Colombian friend Margaria Flores to represent her American life at her funeral in Bogotá. Admittedly, Elizabeth knows little about Margaria, yet she learns of her friend’s deep, rich, sensuous roots that resonate with her own.
A collection as eerily hard to sound as are its characters, heartfelt yet with plenty of puzzling white space.Pub Date: June 14, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6767-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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