A Flannery O'Connor Award debut collection of 15 stories— about half of which have appeared in small mags—that's well- written, straight-forward, and also a bit monotonous. Set in monotone landscapes—sandy, snowy, or flat—Nelson's gloomy stories are about loss, darkness, and the''burdens we carry.'' In ``Dixon,'' a 40-year-old woman finds her losses mounting—her husband leaves, her brother dies, and she must defend the latter against the local rumors concerning him. Some very short pieces pursue similar themes: ``Evolution of Words'' is an elegy for a cousin who, at 17, jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge; ``Nature's Way'' recalls a dorm mate who miscarried in the bathtub, which reminds the narrator of ``the miserable way we reconcile ourselves to our lives''; and ``Exactly Where I Am'' explicitly links the memory of a cousin slicing off two fingers accidentally with the transitory nature of things. ``The Uses of Memory'' portrays two women who deal with impending loss differently: a wife who can't bear the thought of losing her comatose husband, and her daughter, who wishes he would go gently into the night. Family provides some consolation, but it's always threatened by uncontrollable forces. In the title story, a teenager assesses her mother's stream of lovers who ``come and go according to a calendar that only my mother's heart could know.'' The 27-year-old of ``A Map of Kansas,'' who left that state ten years earlier, confronts her ambivalence at a family reunion back home. The 30-ish narrator of ``Paperweight'' bemoans her history of failed love affairs, and the confused teenager in ``Frog Boy'' lusts after his father's girlfriend. When a man's daughter appears unexpectedly in ``Wintercourse,'' neither he nor his wife can penetrate her mysteries. Other stories dwell on the desire for material things, whether unfulfilled or recklessly attained; the one glimmer of hope appears in a bizarre feminist vignette about willed (manless) conception. Competent storytelling, but cumulatively morose.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8203-1571-0
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1993
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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