Selected by Oscar Hijuelos, this 1996 winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award brings together eight stories set in the West, predominantly in Wyoming. As unadorned as the western plains, these tales feature some distinctive characters described in functional, no-frills prose. Originally published in literary magazines, Zancanella's tales move back and forth in time, summoning both the wild days of the 19th century and the present age of corporate ranching. They also explore the days between these eras, including the Cold War period, when Wyoming was first dotted by missile silos. Those edgy times are recalled in ``Disarmament,'' the story of a teacher in remote Wyoming who strikes up a friendship with a military man in charge of maintaining the now-empty silos. The '60s also meant the dawn of TV on the range, an event celebrated in ``Television Lies,'' tracing the excitement evoked in isolated homes by the first transmissions from Cheyenne. ``Cynthia Rising'' explores an uneasy cross-cultural friendship between an Indian boy, living in a small western town, and several of his white classmates. ``Thomas Edison by Moonlight'' views the famous man from the perspective of a 16- year-old aspiring inventor who seeks Edison out, only to discover that the Wizard of Menlo Park is as much a huckster as a genius, traveling in the West in search of pliable investors, not kindred spirits; the 19th-century journal-writer of ``The Chimpanzees of Wyoming'' records his affection for the two apes he displays in saloons across the West. Zancanella's interest in the eccentric figures attracted to the frontier is also in evidence in the contemporary tale of a waitress in Montana who invents an alternate self—an astronomer who predicts the end of the world, to be signalled by a solar eclipse. ``The Electric Evangelist'' chronicles the spiritual conversion of a telephone lineman after he survives being struck by lightning. An earnest debut—Zancanella could develop into a regional writer of interest.
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1996
ISBN: 0-87745-567-8
Page Count: 130
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996
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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