An honest look at the complexity of human emotion and the influence the natural world can have in everyday lives.
In each of these challenging stories, Wortman-Wunder presents nature not as a static specimen but a dynamic presence that interacts with, and often unsettles, human relationships.
A quick flip through this debut collection will tell you that nature is a clear theme for the author. Her characters have “crawled into town from the riverbed” covered in “tar…and gravel, and river mud,” stuffed their bodies into bears’ hibernaculum during the dead of winter, and spent their days burning oakbrush to try to revive suffering ecosystems. But while skimming these stories might convey the “lazy, late summer” tunes of song sparrows and the “damp and algae and mud” smell of life alongside a creek, and would certainly demonstrate the author's poetic gusto, such a cursory glance would only tell half the story. Per the titular warning, this is not a book of comfort. While the mysteries of science and beauty of nature consume her characters, the author is clearly here to explore the messiness of human emotions and the ways people long for, envy, and challenge one another amid these natural environments. "Otters," for example, considers Cynthia’s resentment toward her husband, Billy, who has moved with her to a trailer along the Dolores River. As Billy grows to appreciate “homesteading in rafting country” and takes pleasure in his wife’s fieldwork, Cynthia sleeps late and yearns for a more civilized life. In "The Endangered Fish of the Colorado River," a marine biologist traces the evolution of her bond with her deceased son. As she reflects on the endangered fish she studied during his lifetime, each species serves as a milestone of sorts in their rocky relationship. Not all protagonists are researchers. In the title story, a nurse named Annie tends to a homeless woman who has thrown herself off a freight train. Hungry for details about the woman’s life “of freedom,” Annie tries to get close to the stranger while eschewing her co-workers’ focus on donation drives and social work brochures. Instead of rehashing the trope of man versus nature or romanticizing lives on the margins, Wortman-Wunder offers a fresh take on the murkiness of the connection between humanity, society, and the natural world.
An honest look at the complexity of human emotion and the influence the natural world can have in everyday lives.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-60938-681-8
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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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