An emerging master of the short story returns with a collection that should expand his readership.
The mysteries of family run deep in this unsettling collection of stories about blood ties that bind, unravel and strangle.
Though D’Ambrosio is hardly among the most prolific writers of the contemporary American short story, he ranks with the best. After receiving some good notices for his debut collection (The Point, 1995), he should raise his popular profile among fans of literary fiction with the eight stories in this long-awaited follow-up. Through narration that is never omniscient and often untrustworthy, D’Ambrosio challenges readers to navigate their way (as his characters do) amid complex relationships, conflicting impulses and perceptions of the present shaped profoundly by the past. Many of the stories also concern some form of mental illness that tests the familial bonds, though the distinction between sanity and delusion throughout this fiction can be slippery. “Screenwriter” details a crumbling marriage and a budding romance under suicide watch in the psych ward. Two characters claim to be screenwriters. Maybe both of them are. Maybe neither is. The results are as deadpan funny as they are indelibly sad. In “The High Divide,” two boys on a camping trip find themselves trying to deal with the unfathomable, using words to express what words can’t say, in language that explores the emotional limits of language. Within the devastating “Up North,” a turkey shoot reveals the secret truths that husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, men and men, keep from each other. And from themselves. The title story goes behind the scenes of a bondage porno flick, while the concluding “The Bone Game” finds a grandson from a wealthy family coming to terms with his inheritance, and risking everything, on a reckless mission to scatter his grandfather’s ashes. In his range of subject matter and narrative strategies, D’Ambrosio displays considerable creative ingenuity, yet his achievement extends well beyond formal invention. His fictional universe brims with the bittersweet richness of life.
An emerging master of the short story returns with a collection that should expand his readership.Pub Date: April 21, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-4286-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
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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