Workmanlike, from an inspired source.
Rhoda Manning is resurrected once again in a two-part collection.
The first half is comprised of Rhoda stories, sure to please fans of the many already-existing volumes of such (Collected Stories, 2000, etc.). The title story is told from a very young Rhoda’s point of view on her first abortive hunting trip, while an older Rhoda announces (in “Entropy”) that “My name is Rhoda Manning and sometimes I think too much”—though this doesn’t stop her from expounding on several decades of cross-generational substance abuse. “A Christmas in Wyoming” and “On the Wind River in Wyoming” are largely about Rhoda’s father: he moves to Casper, and, when the family visits, he’s the perfect excuse to explore family tension. After Daddy dies, Rhoda goes on an expedition (“The Golden Bough)” to pick a branch that will let her talk to him, but it’s the Demerol she’s given after a fall that summons him. In the second half, there are no Rhoda stories at all, although with Gilchrist everything is arguably Rhoda. In “Gotterdammerung, in Which Nora Jane and Freddy Harwood Confront Evil in a World They Never Made,” condo fees, the local health club, and a band of international zealots collide in a tale set close enough to 9/11 (on 9/13) that an author’s note is needed. “The Abortion” of two small-town teenagers becomes a bit of rhetoric reflecting the values of their provincial families’ lives and decisions. And in “Remorse,” a gay Arkansas hairdresser is forced to confront the degree of meaning in his life when a client dies for the beauty he realizes he has helped give her. Gilchrist, as always, is clever and wise, and never smarter than when Rhoda thinks: “I’d better start trying to teach them what I know. Every generation has things that will never be known again unless it is told or written down.”
Workmanlike, from an inspired source.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2002
ISBN: 0-316-17358-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
IN THE NEWS
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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