Were these stories actually written earlier than Strom’s affecting first novel? They feel like apprentice work.
The complex experience of cultural assimilation is explored in achingly personal terms in this dour successor to the Asian-American (now Texas resident) author’s debut novel, Grass Roof, Tin Roof (2003).
Its four thematically related long stories all focus on disoriented women desperate to connect with spouses, lovers, family members or territories from which they no longer believe they’ve moved on. “Mary” is an Asian-American film student at a California college, blocked from artistic or emotional maturity by memories of an almost-boyfriend who never cared for her as much as she cared for him, and the father reported drowned when her family escaped from Vietnam, as “boat people.” “Walruses” fashions creepy intermittent drama from the story of a young cocktail waitress and would-be musician (Darcy) continually harassed by the naked stranger who keeps breaking into her apartment. “Neighbors” is a road story, featuring the Vietnamese wife of an American businessman, as she cruises the highways with her young daughter, sinking deeper into introspection and isolation as she scans horizons, looking for an ever-receding “new life.” And in “Husband, Wife…”—which echoes rather too closely the rhetorical texture of “Neighbors”—Sage, a rootless part-Vietnamese singer and songwriter, woolgathers during a car trip with her four-year-old son, over an inconvenient attraction to the boy’s preschool teacher. They’re all vagabonds, even when they seem settled and employed and, to one degree or another, centered, in these nevertheless loose and baggy stories. Strom can write efficiently and movingly about how inconsequential quotidian objects or experiences can rule our moods, and shows an occasional flair for piercing metaphor (e.g., “Mary” climaxes with a sharply phrased faux-biblical parable). But her characters, despite their surface exoticism, are generic, and their inner torments grow increasingly redundant and unconvincing.
Were these stories actually written earlier than Strom’s affecting first novel? They feel like apprentice work.Pub Date: May 31, 2006
ISBN: 1-58243-343-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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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