Connell combines the master fiction writer’s skills (brisk characterization, supple stylistic precision) with those of a...
A rich variety of settings, themes and characters distinguishes this collection from Connell (Deus Lo Volt!, 2000, etc.).
Several recurring characters function as authorial surrogates and analytical observers. Restless loner William Koerner, for example, appears as a former “john” who solicits conflicting stories about an unstable prostitute he cannot forget (“Hooker”); a dutiful nephew becomes inspired and baffled by his elderly uncle’s extravagant tales of foreign travels (“Nan Madol”); and an indignant liberal is appalled by his country’s political naiveté (“The Cuban Missile Crisis”). A reserved insurance executive known only as Muhlbach (also a prominent figure in Connell’s longer fiction) is the dysfunctional paterfamilias of an icy tragicomic family in “Arcturus,” which is inspired—as Connell’s “Preface” acknowledges—by Thomas Mann’s story “Disorder and Early Sorrow.” In “St. Augustine’s Pigeon,” the determined protagonist reinvents himself as a sexual being after his wife’s death had rendered him celibate for many years. The complacent suburbanite of Connell’s novel Mrs. Bridge is reborn, intriguingly, in the paired figures of a retired stockbroker (in “Proctor Bemis”), who laments his once-great country’s descent into mediocrity and dishonesty, and Bemis’s still resolutely conservative spouse (in “Mrs. Proctor Bemis”). Among other highlights: a ruthlessly concise allegorical narrative (the Hemingway-like morality tale “Lion”); a chilling image of peril at sea (“Yellow Raft”); and a viciously entertaining depiction of middle-class spiritual crisis (“Noah’s Ark”).
Connell combines the master fiction writer’s skills (brisk characterization, supple stylistic precision) with those of a compulsive traveler, ruminative antiquarian and borderline-eccentric obsessive.Pub Date: July 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59376-175-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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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