You have to play the hand you’re dealt, these bitter fictions imply. And Cox's worst-case scenarios read just like that:...
Three-time novelist Cox (Night Talk, 1997, etc.) offers 13 stories with familiar Southern Gothic topics—child abuse, brain damage, race relations, absent fathers, fate, and free will—but her undistinguished prose adds little to the litanies of woe.
One particularly unconvincing piece, “Old Court,” set in Mississippi after the Civil War, finds a widowed mother and her teenaged son defending their remote farm from drunken intruders. Though the father here died in an accident, the other men in these somber tales disappear for all sorts of reasons: the father in “Stolen” commits suicide, leaving his troubled son with only one friend, the local junk-dealer; “Biology” shows a 15-year-old whose father has left home transferring her need for affection to an itinerant preacher who seduces her before leaving town; Dad’s dead in “Washed,” and his widow’s warnings against men have no effect on their daughter, who falls heavily for a soldier stationed near town. On a happier note, “O Tannenbaum!” takes two kids whose parents are separating to spend Christmas with their uncle’s family, where they witness the true spirit of the holiday. However badly off some of Cox’s characters seem, her stories often suggest that things could be worse: two follow the sad lives of retarded boys, one loved by his long-suffering parents, the other protected by a kind doctor. At the extreme, in “The Third of July,” an unhappy housewife plans to run away from home until she comes across a horrible auto accident during her escape. Similarly, the young boy in the title story, whose parents are divorced, thinks his life stinks until he helps out a friend who lost his entire family in a car wreck. A particularly creepy tale, “The Last Fourth Grade,” intimates that its narrator in her youth actually encouraged the attentions of her teacher’s husband, a degenerate child-molester.
You have to play the hand you’re dealt, these bitter fictions imply. And Cox's worst-case scenarios read just like that: sententious life lessons with little art.Pub Date: March 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-46329-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
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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