Heart-rending without a trace of sentimentality. McCabe’s eye is as sharp as his tongue, which has an edge that could cut...
Twelve stories, all set in rural Ireland in the 19th and 20th centuries.
McCabe (Death and Nightingales, 2002) has a deep sense of history and a dead-on eye for the long shadows that ancient griefs cast across the years. All of the characters here, in the author’s first collection to appear in the US, suffer to some degree for the sins of their ancestors, but McCabe shows them as something less than victims, insofar as most of them intensify their sufferings with transgressions of their own making. The priggish mother of the title piece, for example, justifies her provincial snobbery as the birthright of a dispossessed Catholic who has finally regained her place in society, only to discover a monstrous secret about her beloved son that destroys the family. Similarly, the deranged vagrant of “Roma,” who becomes obsessed with an innocent schoolgirl, is scandalized in the end to find that she is far more corrupt than he. In “Victorian Fields,” a sort of Rashomon transcript of 19th-century court proceedings, an abused woman swears out a complaint against her brother-in-law and husband—who, in turn, offer blood-curdling evidence of the woman’s own depravity. In “Truth,” a young boy is introduced to the grown-up world of misery and sin when his mother’s housemaid takes him to visit her sister in the slums of Glasgow. The finest stories are the last four—“The Orphan,” “The Master,” “The Landlord,” and “The Mother”—about the sufferings of the Great Famine as they are doled out (more equitably than you might have imagined) to the poor and the great who own, manage, and live in a poorhouse in Ulster: Reminiscent of William’s Trevor’s The News From Ireland in providing a deeply nuanced glimpse of misery in a history gone awry.
Heart-rending without a trace of sentimentality. McCabe’s eye is as sharp as his tongue, which has an edge that could cut glass.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58234-427-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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