McIlroy, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, offers unflinching and original portrayals of human weakness, solitude, and survival in the rural Southwest. In these stories, imperfect characters leading battered lives are as indomitable as the granite mountains and canyons that surround them. Dangerously receptive to the needs of others, McIlroy's characters drink more than they should, fare badly in relationships, and are prone to infidelity. In ``The March of the Toys,'' Claire escapes her self-destructive brother and slowly dying father in Delaware only to move in with an unemployed alcoholic in Tucson. After leaving her lover, she befriends Leah, whose much younger live-in boyfriend is hopelessly unfaithful. As Leah's domestic life deteriorates, Claire offers commiseration, and a therapeutic walk in the mountains ends in unexpected intimacy with the two women in Leah's bed. Sensing Leah's embarrassment about the incident, Claire explains it away and suppresses her own desire. Similarly accommodating is Milton, a Pima Indian in the title story, who trades the drunken, rootless life of the reservation men for sober, backbreaking work on a white man's ranch. Milton loses his job and family when, on a visit to the reservation, he is unable to refrain from drinking with friends in a bar. Accommodation inevitably leads to disappointment, which McIlroy's characters often accept with comprehending grace. Only Boehm, the jilted husband of ``In a Landscape Animals Shrink to Nothing,'' retaliates against his arrogant and faithless wife. On a predivorce vacation in Mexico, he leaves her, drugged with sleeping pills, buried to the neck in the sand of a moonlit beach. Even this ominous adieu, however, is marked by Boehm's untempered love: Before he departs, he carefully brushes the sand from her eyes and cheek. Tightly focused and tersely eloquent, McIlroy's stories chronicle human inconstancy and end up affirming a tranquil wisdom.
Pub Date: June 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8203-1602-4
Page Count: 189
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1994
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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