Repetitious and trite, despite a few plainspoken, heart-rending moments.
Ten stories in a first collection, mostly about middle-aged Southern men coping with a lifetime of regrets and disappointments, from PEN/Faulkner finalist Hays (The Dixie Association, 1984, etc.).
In “The Rites of Love,” the most fully realized piece here, a woman whose only son is killed in a car accident goes to see her first lover, a football player paralyzed from the neck down after a high-school game. Her red silk dress, black underwear and full-length rabbit coat, worn on the night she lost her virginity, become a powerful metaphor for passion lost. “Salvage” also revolves around a marriage haunted by lost love. A man whose wife is in a fatal coma faces up to his “coward’s life” and drives out to visit a girlfriend from 60 years ago, now widowed. “Why He Did It” follows the circuitous rationalizations of a man who exposed himself to his stepdaughter so she would go live with her father; she retaliates years later by becoming engaged to his beloved only son, precipitating a tailspin. In “Material,” a couple is caught in flagrante by the woman’s other lover, who shatters a window and uses a knife. This over-the-top opening is followed by more clichés: the surprised lovers are a graduate student in creative writing and her thesis advisor, whose wife leaves him when the man with the knife tells her about the affair. “Private Dance” begins when a wife finds her husband in his basement lair watching a pornographic video and winds its way through a series of downward spirals that leave the man fired from his coaching job, living in a motel room, paying for sex with the porn star of his dreams. In the title story, 81-year-old Bud McMahon is dying of esophageal cancer. His wife brings their only son to see him in hopes that they can reconcile at last, a proposition that seems as hopeless as his diagnosis.
Repetitious and trite, despite a few plainspoken, heart-rending moments.Pub Date: July 15, 2005
ISBN: 1-59692-125-0
Page Count: 290
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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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