Poet and storywriter Manley's (Within the Ribbons, not reviewed) debut novel—a rural father-son coming-of-ager—could easily have fallen prey to the maudlin and familiar, but it rises soaringly above both, thanks to its author's wonderful timing, eye, ear—and heart. ``The boy,'' as he's namelessly known, is almost 13, and his father, a raiser of fighting birds, has not only given his son the prize cock of the batch but has offered him his first chance to ``handle'' it in an actual cockfight. Patches in the book, without question, labor self-consciously to pronounce and maintain its themes (``That's how it seemed to him, sometimes. The cocks were pure''), but these fall away to insignificance as the reader begins to trust Manley's ongoing skills for what's real, accurate, and observed. The boy's monstrously crude, trailer-trash father, Jake Cantrell, is as close to an escapee from the Snopes archives as you can get, and yet the perfect capturing both of his speech (`` `That's you,' his daddy said. `Just because he's walking around don't mean he ain't dead' '') and actions, right down to the way he gets money out of his pants pocket, makes him anything but an imitation. The same goes for the boy's mother, the Bible-believing Lily, whose grief is boundless at losing her son—now that he's entering puberty—to the crude and ``manly'' indoctrinations of Jake. If Lily is at risk too of tumbling into melodrama, she's saved by the same perfect details and quiet rigors of Manley's art that lift all his characters from the page—including Lily's alcoholic brother Homer—and do the same for the story's events, not only the cockfight but the ghastly later results of it, which few could present with Manley's clean and understated power. Akin, say, to A River Runs Through It—a minor masterpiece, however well-worn the genre, that stands on its own two legs. Strong and fine.
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-56689-073-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1998
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
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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