Sad, sexy, and significant.
A dozen stories, culled from collections first published in Canada, that straddle the line between sadness and sadism.
The recurring theme is the carnal appetite of the lonely—and the inevitable poor consequences that result when that appetite is sated. “Iglaf and Swan” follows the bitter, failed careers and marriage of a pair of poets caught up in their own lusts and intellectualisms as they give birth to a daughter doomed to suicide: “They only wished that the moment could go on, that they could always feel this important, tragic and redeemed.” The same story warns: “This is a dark story, growing darker still,” and so goes the collection. The failure of tortured romance may find its best metaphor when a blind man falls into a river and a dog tries to save him (“Dog Attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon”). “A Guide to Animal Behavior” is a brief account of lives and morals so mislaid they can only be represented by fragments and non-sequiturs. The title piece consists of “the eternal triangle: recently released mental patient, woman and other woman from down the hall,” but the dynamics are unusual, with the group finding redemption as the mental patient narrator seduces his two women with stories of a life not lived. A family’s ghosts, meanwhile, in “A True Piece of the Cross,” take on tangible character as an old summerhouse comes to represent all the unspeakable secrets attendant upon filial love. Glover’s (The Life and Times of Captain N., 1993, etc.) mannered tales are often quite self-conscious in their telling, aware that they are fabrications of an emergent truth stronger than simple fact. Perhaps the author is too often reliant on aberrant sexual behavior for tension, but needlessly—these stories draw their power from a deeper source.
Sad, sexy, and significant.Pub Date: April 29, 2003
ISBN: 1-56478-286-7
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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