A debut collection of stories set in the small towns of the Rio Grande Valley, the best of them out-of-kilter explorations of childhood mischief. All but a few of the 14 pieces are situated in places like Edcouch, Texas (population 2,683), the author's own hometown, and such nearby metropolises as Harlingen and McAllen, among the poor, working-class Mexican-American families that are the backbone of the Valley region. Most successful here are first-person tales of childhood as Rice himself experienced it, growing up in those towns with their intimate feeling and comparatively simple problems, told with wry humor. He remembers such offbeat pastimes as frog-throwing and an amusing first—and last—adventure in fishing; he's also a particularly astute observer of the casual cruelties that children inflict on innocent animals and one another, though he's able to treat them with an affectionate wit that softens the sting. Other stories are rather more uneven, too often leading to predictable twist endings. The best of them, the title story, about two feuding cousins and a potbelly pig, and ``Cutting Away,'' are poignant tales of lost love and soured marriage that hint at, then shy away from, potential melodrama. Rice has a nice feeling for the rhythms of everyday small-town life and the forces of family life in that context, but he occasionally slips into easy irony, particularly in less substantial tales like ``Calves Never Forget'' and ``Empty Corner.'' Here and elsewhere, Rice's writing is strained, his plotting pat or downright unbelievable. Overall, though, his Edcouch comes alive as a setting, and it'll be interesting to see where the author's future work takes him. One could conceive of his finding a comfortable niche in the pages of Chicano literature in the years to come. An inconsistent but not unpromising debut.
Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1996
ISBN: 0-927534-54-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Bilingual Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
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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