This quick read is a mixed bag of dark, disturbing stories, with a couple of literary gems.
A collection of contemporary short stories with some touches of magic realism.
Anger seems to be the dominant theme running through the seven stories in Crane’s debut collection. Readers are treated to angry employees like the protagonists of “The Little Flower of the Newsroom” and the haunting “The Last Day is Better than the First”; characters who seem unnaturally predisposed to anger like those in the title story and “The Judgement of the Light”; and a trio of angry old ladies in “The Sleeper Awakes,” “The Ghost” and “Return of the Prodigal.” Women in general come across as a mean-spirited, conniving, murderous group who are only slightly redeemed by the more goodhearted women of the final story, “The Judgment of the Light.” Crane produces spot-on descriptions like that of an old man’s body that was “as thin and shapeless as a can of Pringles” and clever turns of phrase such as “[h]e’d learned to live with it, the way people learn to live with leprosy or a criminal record,” but at times the phrases are clunky, like the narrator’s description of his life in the title story as “an accretion of uninteresting contingencies” or the explanation from “The Ghost” that “their moral calculus conferred upon father and son a right to unrestrained verbal vengeance.” Tales like “The Little Flower of the Newsroom,” with its clever title and unexpected conclusion, and the haunting glimpse into the mind of a mass murderer in “The Last Day is Better than the First,” make this slim volume worthy of further exploration. Readers will likely have more difficulty identifying with the mentally unbalanced first-person narrator of the title story and the angry young protagonist of “The Judgement of the Light.” Also difficult to identify with are Mrs. Marion from “The Ghost” and the elderly woman in “The Sleeper Awakes,” both of whom are filled with hatred for their daughters-in-law, though it’s possible that, based on the images only she can see on a static-filled television channel, the latter may be justified in her disapproval.
This quick read is a mixed bag of dark, disturbing stories, with a couple of literary gems.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456444020
Page Count: 145
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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