Hapless young men from Pittsburgh and environs confront life's grim realities in ten stories by Fincke (The Double Negatives of Living, 1992, etc.—not reviewed), many of which first appeared in quarterlies. Seven are set in the late 60's and early 70's in Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, where characters' primary concern is to avoid the draft; the other three, set in current times, look backward with a bleak brand of nostalgia. In the opening story, ``The Nazi on the Phone,'' a Kent State graduate student, trying to hang on to his deferment in the autumn after the National Guard shootings, reluctantly goes hunting for a town-based group of Nazis with his somewhat paranoid friend Dick. In the title story, a 19-year-old bakery worker discusses politics and air pollution with the bigoted, drunken, or half-informed people around him, all of whom seem headed for disaster—a condition symbolized by the town's two bridges, one rotted away, the other leading nowhere. In the ambitious ``Tinderbox,'' the loudmouthed Blevins, housemate of the protagonist in an Oxford, Ohio, fleabag, unwisely chooses the afternoon before the assassination of Martin Luther King to jeer and bait the neighborhood's black mailman; only by the unlikely intervention of their histrionic, gun-toting landlord are the two tenants later saved from immolation by a crowd of black people. These are not pleasant stories, mostly because the main characters tend to remain neutral in the face of crudely depicted evil. The nostalgic pieces—including ``The Man Who Played for the Skyliners,'' ``My Father Told Me,'' and ``Story Stories''—are subtler: in the last, and perhaps most accomplished here, a fortysomething father's moral indifference when implicated in an old high-school classmate's nervous breakdown—having something to do with his stint in Vietnam—finally shades off into empathy and kindness. For the most part, though, Fincke's stories are somewhat gritty and unpolished—a kind of lesser Bobbie Ann Mason for men.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-56689-013-6
Page Count: 185
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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