Composed, pleasant, stately, always interesting minor neo-classics of the genre.
Connolly debuts with a collection of smooth, alluring, and satisfying stories that are very much at home in the traditional mode, perhaps appropriately for a daughter of a great English journalist, critic, and author, the late Cyril Connolly.
Longish, these nine tales let their author—and their characters—move at a natural, associative pace from one subject to another, as in the opener, “How I Lost My Vocation,” which effortlessly combines cancer, religious belief, and adultery in a Bristol family with never a false or forced note in its ten-year-old narrator’s voice. From time to time the apparent effortlessness flags slightly and “message” peeks through, as in a case of a strained marriage (“Canada”) or the more ambitious closing story (“Indian Summer”), again about adultery and a failed marriage (and an overweight boy), though even then Connolly’s observant eye and leisurely pace keep the mix rich and rewarding. What must be one of the most extraordinarily plotted short stories of all time is “Greengages,” about the life-long effect on a mother and daughter of the daughter’s infant kidnapping and what must be kept secret about it; “The Pleasure Gardens,” however, while equally readable, moves onto more familiar turf, father-daughter sexual abuse, though cunningly placing it in a frame about loneliness and adolescence. The narrative voice in “Paradise Drive,” rather artificially spoken (in part) by a car-stealing, lower-class English boy, rings less true than the best, as does “Bare,” about a woman who, in what she hopes to be a daring act in response to feeling lovelorn, gets a tattoo on her buttock. “The Bounce,” though, comes back full-strength, avoiding the least hint of either the familiar or the maudlin in a story about an Irish farmer, married, who falls in love with a lion-tamer in the WWII years—a story as full as many a novel could wish to be.
Composed, pleasant, stately, always interesting minor neo-classics of the genre.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26171-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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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