An excellent introduction to a substantial and distinctive oeuvre, and a welcome reminder of how good this often underrated...
A retrospective collection of 27 stories, written over a period of more than half a century, by a southern writer whose best fiction merits comparison with the work of Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty.
This is a much more rigorously selective, and hence more satisfying, volume than the 1981 Stories of Elizabeth Spencer—if only because it omits her tepid, meandering novella “Knights & Dragons,” substituting for it “The Light in the Piazza,” perhaps her most triumphantly Jamesian contrast of American and European manners and morals. Simultaneously, it’s an augmented version containing six previously uncollected stories, the finest of which offer fresh variations on Spencer’s central preoccupation: women’s inner lives and the secrets they harbor, and sometimes uncover. Especially effective are “The Legacy,” about an inheritance that encourages a lonely young disabled woman’s gesture of independence; “The Master of Shongalo,” in which a spinster teacher visits the lavish home of an adoring student’s family—and stumbles over the skeletons in its roomy closets; and “Owl,” which reveals in a terse four pages a neglected wife’s submerged erotic longings. The other 21 stories are grouped geographically, according to the three places (the American South, Italy, and eastern Canada) where virtually all of Spencer’s fiction is set—and showcase her graceful prose and impressive descriptive powers as they explore her characteristic themes: racial tensions in (her native) Mississippi and thereabouts (“The Little Brown Girl”); romantic and sexual fixation (“Ship Island,” “The Girl Who Loved Horses”); crippling psychological disturbances (“The Finder,” “First Dark”), and compact social studies in which the attitudes of the Old South are tested by the pressures of other cultures (“I, Maureen,” “The White Azalea”).
An excellent introduction to a substantial and distinctive oeuvre, and a welcome reminder of how good this often underrated writer can be.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-64218-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Modern Library
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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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