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GATES OF EDEN

Fourteen variously weird tales from the producing half of the Coen Brothers movie team. Though only one of the stories is titled “It Is an Ancient Mariner,” most seem to be told by somebody more determined to buttonhole his audience than to explain exactly what he has in mind. One of Coen’s two favorite subjects, as you’d expect from films like Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, and Fargo, is seriously skewed annals of crime. “Cosa Minapolidan” chronicles the efforts of a clueless crime boss to establish his reputation after he migrates to the Twin Cities. “Destiny” follows the world’s worst boxer through his equally unsuccessful stint as a bedroom dick. “A Fever in the Blood” asks how another private eye copes after getting his ear bitten off. The title story tosses a California weights-and-measures man into a Japanese blackmail plot. Coen’s crime stories work up to climactic tableaux rather than resolutions, and therefore aren’t all that different from his other stories, which focus on the psychopathology of everyday life. He follows a father on a hellishly ordinary camping trip with his two sons in “The Boys,” wonders what might happen to Hebrew school bullies in “The Old Country” and “I Killed Phil Shapiro,” and recounts selected events leading up to a long-suffering woman’s murder of her husband in “It Is an Ancient Mariner.” The deadpan, playfully grave tone throughout both kinds of stories is amusingly consistent, whether Coen is evoking Samuel Beckett or Philip Marlowe with a propeller atop his fedora. Surprisingly, three dialogues——Johnnie Ga-Botz,” “The Old Boys,” and the promisingly titled “Hecter Berlioz, Private Investigator”—are both less funny and less substantial. Maybe they need John Goodman and Frances Macdormand to fill in the blanks. A final surprise: “Red Wing,” the one story that tries to root weird abnormalities in weird normalities, is a bit too precious to come off. Like this debut collection as a whole, though, it’s a valuable portrait of the artist as a middle-aged neophyte.

Pub Date: Nov. 4, 1998

ISBN: 0-688-15914-1

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998

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THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

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

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SIGHTSEEING

STORIES

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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