Yates is a wise stylist who knows exactly where he wants to go, but you’ll want to shake the stiffness out of most of these...
In this debut collection, Yates explores, in precise prose, domestic life at its most intimate
Nearly everybody here is looking for a home, be it real or metaphorical. In “Oceanside, 1985,” a young couple with a baby on the way makes plans to build a new house; the protagonist of “A Certain Samaritan” derails a long return trip home by getting caught up in the lives of the Jesus-freak couple he picks up on the side of the road; and in “Persimmons,” a man is actually at home but trapped on the roof, as the ladder he’s just climbed falls away. Yates (English/Univ. of Calif., Riverside) loves accidental meetings, and he focuses on relatively modest concerns and conflicts, though nobody would confuse him with a minimalist. His writing is distinguished by lengthy, detail-rich paragraphs and a taste for bone-dry ironic humor. His work also possesses a kind of academic formality that makes much of it feel overworked, with any emotional resonance swallowed up by the author’s carefulness: The cuckolded art scholar in “Gisela,” for example, visits the young man sleeping with his wife, pisses on his carpet and explains that “the path of my urine shows no respect for that arbitrary delineation of field.” Luckily, the collection is book-ended by two winners. The opener, “The Black Mercedes,” is a powerfully comic tale of a couple whose house-sitting gig becomes increasingly catastrophic after the arrivals of an old friend of the homeowner, who dies almost immediately after showing up, and his lusty young granddaughter. In the title story, a downhearted retiree volunteers to talk to college students about his experiences; the emotional twists that follow as he grows attached to one woman in particular are deeply affecting.
Yates is a wise stylist who knows exactly where he wants to go, but you’ll want to shake the stiffness out of most of these stories.Pub Date: April 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-55849-525-8
Page Count: 168
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
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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