Many facets of life and love, each polished until it sparkles, in a gem of a collection that pulses with humanity and warmth.
Fourteen down-to-earth tales (all but one previously published), full of insight into how plain folks, families, and friends encounter disappointment and upheaval—and occasionally profound loss. A compassionate, rewarding first collection.
Gilliland’s (Being a Minor Writer, not reviewed) title story explores variations on the theme of longing—from a train conductor who observes a young working woman and her much older husband moving through stages from closeness to alienation; through an old man who allows himself to be run over by a train; and on to a young man who falls hard for his much older boss, a powerful figure in a Christian Science–like religion—but who loses her when the church has to sell its building and he loses his job as well. A maladjusted Vietnam vet, in “Purple Heart,” never far from his memories of the war, takes simple pleasure in talking with the Spanish cashier in the Circle K—until his routine takes on a different sense of déjà vu when he witnesses her in the act of being robbed. In “Witches,” a single mom moves with her daughter from Detroit to Albuquerque in order to get a fresh start: hitching a ride with a kind trucker, she gets settled in only to become unsettled again when a Navajo professor who’s befriended her begins to act as if she’s seeing a ghost. And in the understated and resonant tale “Permanence,” a survivor of young romance describes her heady relationship with a former high-school French teacher, a Stanford student, who woos her, drops her, and woos her again—even more intensely—only to reveal himself an utter, unabashed snob.
Many facets of life and love, each polished until it sparkles, in a gem of a collection that pulses with humanity and warmth.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2001
ISBN: 0-88748-362-3
Page Count: 280
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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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