Winner of the Flannery O—Connor Award, Soos’s first fiction shows talent galore one moment and tries your patience with the familiar and homespun the next. Soos’s eye for detail and his judgment for selecting it can be as good as you—ll find, but his glimpses into people’s daily life aren—t always tonic enough to offset the malaise of the sentimental—as in —When the Hoot Owl Moves Its Nest,— a man’s remembering back to an adultery of his wife’s (—Mostly what people call love is just another word for pain—). More keen-edged but not necessarily less strained is —Nickerson’s Luck,— about a divorced accountant starting an affair with a waitress who may be below him in privilege and class (—Mister, you don—t know what bad luck is—) but proves his superior in wile. In search of symbols to echo and carry his meaning, Soos can be guilty of leaving psychological believability behind, as in the story of the kindly but hyperbolically weak-willed father in —Ray’s Boat.— —Trip to Sometimes Island— does a good job of encapsulating the life of a car mechanic who—ll never be anything more than he is but knows he’s not enough; and —If You Meet the Buddha by the Road— does the same for a high-school genius (“Two things have made Western Civilization worthwhile: the bicycle and the pocket knife. Otherwise, it’s all been a waste of effort—) who never found his way in life afterward. —Key to the Kingdom— is a fine but familiar dissection of small-town life—with religion, adultery, and suicide—and —Unified Field Theory,— bristling with ambition in the tale of another almost-ne—er-do-well, even so can blend a glibness in among the gems (—Acted on by gravity, electromagnetic fields, solar wind, ether wind, lunar attractions, who among us can claim to be truly responsible for anything that happens?—). Talent at work—but also waiting for new territory.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8203-2048-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
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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