The heroine of this third and decreasingly engaging installment in the McDade Cycle (Lily, 1992; Looking for Lily, not reviewed) is a young woman who gets into trouble in small-town Texas of the 1890's as she follows her heart rather than her head. As the story begins, Dellie, Lily's younger sister, has been married for two years to Daniel O'Barr, a local farmer and lawyer. Daniel is kind and generous but often absent, leaving Dellie restless and bored. At a picnic celebrating a reunion of local Confederate veterans, she meets handsome Andy Ashland, her father's tenant farmer, who delivers a fiery speech in favor of Populism. Four days later, her father, dying of cancer, commits suicide. Dellie, who had married Daniel in part to escape Papa's harsh ways, finds it difficult to grieve. Increasingly attracted to Andy, she starts attending local Populist meetings to hear him speak, begins writing for the Populist paper, and (when her husband is out of town) she spends time with Andy and his two children. Andy is married, but his wife is hospitalized in an Austin asylum; he is also heavily in debt, especially to local merchant Louis Bassist, whom he accuses of usury. Soon deeply smitten, Dellie follows Andy to Austin for a tryst and decides to divorce Daniel. When Andy leaves town, she impulsively sets Bassist's store on fire and flees to Louisiana, hoping to meet up with her lover there. When he fails to come, she returns to McDade to give herself up. Dellie and Daniel reconcile. She's tried and imprisoned for arson, finding some consolation in becoming an ardent Suffragist. In always nicely evoked period settings, Dellie tries hard to be strong, sexy, and politically progressive, but she never quite comes alive either as a ``new woman'' or a heartwrenching romantic.
Pub Date: March 31, 1996
ISBN: 1-56512-103-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
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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