Unparalleled etchings of loss and foreboding.
Eleven new stories from stylist Schutt attain a haunting beauty in elegiac moments.
Schutt’s prose is nearly tactile, and so lyrically concise that it’s maddening to read for long periods. Grasping the spare language requires attention to what is understated and implied, such as the true relationships among many of the characters. The first story, “Darkest of All,” follows a mother, Jean, on visits to the drug-rehabilitation facility where her young son, Jack, a “felonious boy,” is incarcerated. The story hints at the curious closeness among the fatherless family: Jean, hardly ever sober herself but “prudent in her daily use of substances,” Ned, her other serious son who scratches her back, literally and figuratively, and Jack, who carves his name all over the facility with a fork—to get back at his mother? Similarly, in “Do You Think I Am Who I Will Be?” the aging teacher narrator returns to his city apartment after an absence, wearing “party clothes,” all the while obsessing about a much younger student lover named Madeline, whom he also knew as a girl. Madeline “has an orphan appeal, and her famished prettiness gives off heat”; the narrator tries to write to her in his stifling apartment that smells like dog but can only come up with the word fouled. “They Turn Their Bodies into Spears” recounts a surprise visit by 20-year-old granddaughter Charlotte to her elderly grandparents’ island. The 80-year-old grandfather simply marvels at this darling girl, remembering achingly his own daughter, the girl’s mother, before she became an angry brooder and fell in some fashion—put away in a home? “See Amid the Winter’s Snow” revisits some of the territory of the imperious mother in the nursing home delineated in Schutt’s NBA-nominated novel Florida (2003), while “Winterreise” is a gorgeously mournful Thoreauvian tale set in New York City about a woman’s reluctant witnessing to her lifelong friend’s demise by cancer.
Unparalleled etchings of loss and foreboding.Pub Date: June 29, 2005
ISBN: 0-8101-5153-7
Page Count: 165
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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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