The impulse to shed our birth families and make our own, and the contrary tug of blood that lures us back to our origins, are the emotionally charged matter of these ten linked stories, set in North Carolina Arkansas, and Texas, by a talented new Arkansas writer. Their common bond is protagonist and narrator Richard, whom we first meet (in “Why I’m Talking”) as an eight-year-old who stops speaking when his mother attempts suicide, and is appeased by bonding with the teenaged daughter of his grandfather’s black mistress, as well as with his unregenerate father’s new girlfriend. The complex folly of his parents’ on-again/off-again marriage is disclosed to him a few years later (in “What Men Love For”). Subsequent pieces depict Richard’s own troubled relationships with girls and women (“At the Edge of the New World”), fatherhood and marital failures (“Everything Quiet Like Church,” “When Love Gets Worn”), and partial reconciliations with the crazy people who gave him life and never can seem to relax their grip on him (“What We Are Up Against” and the resonant, concluding title story). There’s some unavoidable repetition, and a couple of particularly shapeless stories (such as “Corporal Love”) that amass anecdotes from various stages of Richard’s early life. But the collection’s strong points are the vivid characterizations of Richard’s parents (seen only briefly, but always to telling effect) and firm control of a tone of reflective melancholy that exactly suits Phillips’s empathetic portrayal of a thoughtful man trying to understand where he comes from and what he’s made of. “We were a hard people,” Richard muses, “who counted time by tragedies and who took a storyteller’s pleasure in reshaping our sadness.” Just so; and that’s why we take a reader’s pleasure in sharing it.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-393-04715-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
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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