One of the best books of the year thus far. Like Andrea Barrett, Donoghue has staked a claim to her own distinctive...
Seventeen stories by the Irish-born Canadian author (Slammerkin, 2001, etc.) ransack what Donoghue calls “the flotsam and jetsam of the last seven hundred years of British and Irish life” for razor-sharp vignettes of the fates of women in judgmental male-dominated societies.
The volume gets off to a flying start with “The Last Rabbit,” in which a duplicitous “man-midwife” persuades a poor countrywoman to claim she has experienced a miraculous birthing. It’s a tale inspired by a famous Hogarth engraving—as Donoghue explains in the first of the “Note(s)” (acknowledging sources) that follow each story. Next up is the nicely titled “Acts of Union,” about a drunken English soldier serving in Ireland who’s hoodwinked into marrying a wily apothecary’s spinster niece. You’ll think of Boccaccio and Chaucer (as well as Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood) as Donoghue ranges among the lives of eminent figures, focusing, for example, on asexual art historian John Ruskin’s ludicrous nuptial night (“Come, gentle Night”); feminist intellectual Mary Wollstonecraft’s failed career as governess (“Words for Things”); and the infuriating Elmer Gantry–like hypocrite, apocalyptic preacher Elspeth “Luckie” Buchan (“Revelations”). Equally telling are stories of the obscure: the smallest surviving baby ever heard of, exhibited as a freak of nature (“A Short Story”); a plucky victim of the barbarous practice of clitoridectomy, undertaken to combat “the disease of self-irritation” (“Cured”); two learned ladies who live in scholarly seclusion on the Norfolk coast, pausing from their mental exertions to rescue drowning sailors (“Salvage”); and, in the remarkable “The Necessity of Burning,” invincibly ignorant Margery Starre, an illiterate beldame to turns lustily to book-burning during the 14th-century Peasants’ Revolt against the intellectual tyranny of Cambridge University. These jewel-like stories vibrate with thickly textured detail and vigorous period language. Donoghue’s colorful, confrontational historically based fiction is making something entirely new and captivating out of gender issues.
One of the best books of the year thus far. Like Andrea Barrett, Donoghue has staked a claim to her own distinctive fictional territory.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-100937-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
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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