by Christie Hodgen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 2002
Fine stories and flexible prose promise greater things to come.
The winner of this year’s Associated Writing Programs Award for short fiction is a hit on all counts.
First-timer Hodgen breaks nine stories into parts I and II. Who knows why, and who cares? Sadness and skill pervade her tales, the fantastic is laced through with the realistic, and solid human feeling is always the goal. In the title story, a young woman contends with the tedium of suburbia, with a mother who insists on speaking to her children through teddy bears, and with a father who has run off to detox centers in the East. Though the boy next door won’t take off his ghost costume, the narrator feels inexplicably attracted to his silent asceticism. Lilting, dreamlike “Take Them In, Please” delineates a young woman’s first expedition into the larger world of possibility, medical students, and life on her own. “Three Parting Shots and a Forecast,” an amusing piece of alternative history, reexplores the assassination of Lincoln with plenty of artistic and humorous license. In “Going Out of Business Forever,” an odd patriarch looming over twin daughters manages a tenuous grip on control and sanity as Christmas approaches the small town they all haunt. A brother and sister escape to Graceland in “The Hero of Loneliness,” headed first for the concrete world of fame and then for the cloudier world of metaphysics. Characters in a couple of tales reappear and merge with those in others, demonstrating not only the author’s skill, but her ambition. Hodgen tends to overdescribe and overpopulate her worlds, a flaw that suggests she’s growing out of the confines of the short form. There’s a good novel waiting to be shaped by her unique voice and vision: zany, smart, humane.
Fine stories and flexible prose promise greater things to come.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-55849-374-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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BOOK REVIEW
by Tim O’Brien ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 28, 1990
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
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by Tim O’Brien
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by Tim O’Brien
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by Tim O’Brien
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SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
by Rattawut Lapcharoensap ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2005
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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