An intriguing but inconsistent collection.
Hull (The Sun God is a Ham, 2013, etc.) provides a series of short tales in multiple genres that tackle the comedy and tragedy of everyday life.
Each of the stories in this collection delivers a final twist—a zinger that sums up or alters the story in an unexpected way. The adherence to this structure leads to a somewhat uneven collection, juxtaposing surprising stories with predictable, leaden ones. “Three Sisters,” which details a Vermont hike interrupted by a curious black bear, and “Trapped,” about a rescue of trapped coal miners in a small Pennsylvania town, effectively build tension and develop their characters, and both have satisfying codas. Other, lighter stories feel limp by comparison, such as “The Zipper,” about a couple that find themselves lost on a Florida back road, and “Shamus the Leprechaun,” about a couple’s anticlimactic trip to Ireland. A few tales depict chance romantic encounters: “Green Dress” and “Saying Goodbye in Baggage Claim” both focus on surprising trysts between older men and younger women, while “Triage a Trois” reverses the formula with a tale of young, male musician falling for an older woman. “The Runner” is the most successful romance, featuring a divorced main character who finally builds up the courage to ask out a beautiful woman he met at the park. On the tragic side, “A Day at the Beach” sees a man contemplating suicide while on vacation, while “The Shoe” imagines what happened to a group of seven young men and women who disappeared during a freak winter storm. Hull’s prose often relies heavily on dialogue, although he skillfully narrates the interior lives of his characters at times. But the descriptions are generally unspectacular, and the twists often predictable, due to their lack of subtlety; the author might have tamped the foreshadowing down more, in order to better preserve the twists. The author’s longer stories are often his best, as the characters are able to breathe and the surprises can be teased out over a longer time. The shorter tales that make up most of the collection, however, don’t afford such luxuries.
An intriguing but inconsistent collection.Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9814956-5-1
Page Count: 276
Publisher: LaMaison Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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