Around the world in 15 polished if unremarkable stories as Wesselmann touches down in places as far-flung as Chile, Japan, Italy—and in American states north and south. To this first-time author's credit, the choice of diverse settings for her tales of love and loss never seems worked or flaky. Characters aren't just foreign imports doing their thing in local costume. The three best tales are ``Rosa's Vision,'' ``Core Puncher,'' and ``Ingrid, Face Down.'' The first follows a Chilean farmer's wife who recently lost her son in an accident and finds both herself and the son becoming objects of veneration when she meets a mysterious stranger on Good Friday. ``Core Puncher'' is about a woman whose young daughter died of cancer. She assuages her grief by chasing tornadoes and getting as close to their core as possible. Similarly, an overimaginative teacher in ``Ingrid...'' conquers her fear of water by snorkeling in the Caribbean; there, she discovers a ``sensation of complete peace and isolation.'' In the title piece, the daughter of an Italian family who rents out their villa to visiting foreigners grows to better understand her father when an American dad thanks her for recovering his own daughter, astray in a forest. Other tales observe with wry wit the adjustments that couples must make when they're joined in multicultural marriages—adjustments both to their new families and their new countries. The young Chinese woman in ``Life as a Dragon,'' for instance, defends herself culturally in her adopted US (``She did not understand the importance of making snowballs'') by metaphorically playing the dragon, slipping ``her tail without detection around the waist of an enemy''—and, like any good Chinese, never drawing blood. Stories that move and amuse but lack a distinctive edge.
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-87074-420-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Southern Methodist Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
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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