An important contribution to war literature, and certainly a talent to watch. Along with Jonathan Safran Foer and others,...
Eight debut stories and a novella about America’s relationship with conflict and violence in the context of the Gulf War.
If combat is changing, then so must war stories. The novella here, “Notes From a Bunker Along Highway 8,” is a rambling account of a soldier stationed along the Euphrates River contending with the chimpanzees in his care; with a one-armed buddy to whom he is teaching yoga; and with letters from his angry Green-Beret-hero-just-come-out-of-the-closet father. In the letters the soldier is told, “I can’t wait to see the great stories your generation write about their war. Oh, boy. That’s going to be fascinating. What do you know of honor, of sacrifice, of death anyway?” A good deal, it turns out, though expect it in the form of wacky. In “The Cure as I Have Found It,” the bloodthirsty origins of war can’t be escaped even by a vet: his life and trauma are retold in the tone of impassioned hypercombat. “Cross Dresser” is a Stealth pilot ex-POW’s melancholy and metaphysical explanation of why, now, his wife has films of him in girls’ dresses. The title story is a letter to Bush from a loyal young corporal who comes home from the war with an extra ear, which causes his wife to grow an extra tooth, both suggesting the effect of war on family. “The American Green Machine” is a satire of a futuristic recruitment scheme that brainwashes jarheads. Hudson’s tales deliver their sad humanity in the mode of absurdity, and deep beneath the wordplay and high-jinks are plenty of smart satire and not a few tears. At times, the imagery can seem adolescent, but even this rings true for a nation that is itself, Hudson tells us, adolescent. Still, one wishes for fewer easy jokes and more lines like “Dead sheep littered the landscape like fallen clouds.”
An important contribution to war literature, and certainly a talent to watch. Along with Jonathan Safran Foer and others, Hudson was featured in the New Yorker’s Debut Writers of 2001 issue.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41395-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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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