Intimate portrayals of darkness told in Schutt’s tight and affecting prose.
Ten stories and a novella that give us oblique glimpses of tragedy.
Schutt’s (Prosperous Friends, 2012, etc.) distinct and economic style is on full display throughout this slim collection. She makes use of parentheticals frequently. In “The Duchess of Albany,” the main character recalls her late husband’s old age in an off-camera, single-sentence scene: “(Owen at the long table, saying to the ringing phone, ‘Go away, people. Leave us alone,’ and people pretty much did).” Schutt offers surprising reminders of the ghastly and gruesome that are never too far away. The second and penultimate stories, "The Hedges" and "Oh, the Obvious," feature accidents that occur on vacations. In each, the narrative perspective makes the reader essentially a bystander witnessing terrible, even fatal, events that befall a stranger. In “Where You Live, When You Need Me?” a mother recounts the summer when Ella, a much-needed babysitter, appeared out of nowhere. “Everyone shared Ella. She had work every day if she wanted.” Nobody ever even knew Ella’s last name, and this was no innocent time of naiveté. Indeed, this was 1984, “the summer when little parts of little bodies turned up in KFC buckets in Dumpsters in the city.” The title piece, the novella, layers the tragedy. We open on a California wildfire and then meet Mimi, a young, recent widow of a famous comedian who was four decades her senior. We see Mimi relive her own troubled childhood before she becomes an unintentional witness to another family’s tragedy. Through this, the novella—like the collection—maintains a dark wit that keeps it buoyant. In a tense conversation with her late husband’s son, Mimi is asked, “What did you and my dad ever have in common?” She answers with the perfect punch line, “He didn’t really like his kids and neither do I.”
Intimate portrayals of darkness told in Schutt’s tight and affecting prose.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2761-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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