Consistent and moving tales, a winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award (also see Sutton, below).
A third collection from Fincke (Emergency Calls, 1996, etc.) is as steady as a hammer, nailing the emotional shifts of men hovering over the half-century mark.
The title piece of the 12 stories here sets the terrain: Ben works at a bookstore and spends his Friday nights drinking beer at his friend Jerry’s clubhouse—a shrine, though from 150 miles away, to Pittsburgh sports. Since he turned 50, Ben’s annual visits to his physician, Dr. Parrish, have included the invasive exam that checks the prostate. This time, she suggests further tests, and his worries have a new focus (“He needed to shut up about the 1950s. He had color in his hair; he had a flat stomach; concentrate your stories in the ’60s, he said to himself . . . .”). Mostly, Fincke’s straightforward narratives open up to glimmers of insight, as when Ben thinks, “Everything . . . was so dreadful . . . it couldn’t be spoken. It didn’t matter that he suspected everybody carried such a secret, and that the only thing that prevented them from hating each other was silence.” Other men cope with vasovagal incidents, brain surgery, a mother’s death, a daughter’s vulnerability to danger. In “Gatsby, Tender, Paradise,” a father’s concern about the attentiveness of his teenaged daughter’s English teacher is misplaced, but it turns out his protective instincts are right. “The History of Staying Awake” throws a curveball at an insomniac who sets out at two a.m. to buy ice cream and ends up in the middle of a domestic dispute between a couple in the housing projects. The wife, Tanya, jumps into his van and insists he drive her to her mother to escape Damon, who tracks down the “hero” for revenge. Fincke’s description of Damon is typical of his precision: “His hair, short on the sides, hung down to his shoulders in the back. It looked like the kind of haircut you’d give a small dog, one of those breeds that snarls at your shoes.”
Consistent and moving tales, a winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award (also see Sutton, below).Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8203-2656-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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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