Gemlike stories that focus on contemporary issues in Ireland.
Donovan (Sunless, 2007, etc.) provides quiet stories of place and displacement, of relationships and disruption.
“Morning Swimmers,” the first story in the collection, examines how a man named Jim unintentionally eavesdrops on a conversation between two of his friends and unwittingly finds out more than he wants to know—about their opinion of him, about their speculations on his sexuality and about his marriage. Out of anger Jim pays them back in kind, and the result is a friendship gone terribly awry. The second story has much the same conceit, but this time the dramatic situation features a husband and wife. On the road to Galway, Peter asks his wife Brenda, “If I died tomorrow, how long would you wait until you did it with someone else?” Peter’s attempt to elicit a sense of deep connection with Brenda leads to her admission that she’s already thought of being unfaithful when he’s been away on business trips. Once again brutal honesty leads to the re-evaluation and diminishment of a relationship. In “Another Life,” Mary Connolly visits a solicitor to receive legal documents attendant on the sudden death by heart attack of her husband, Paul, whom she has always seen as a “good man” throughout their 30 years of childless marriage. Among other things, she’s handed a key to a small house in the village of Oranmore, five hours from where she lives in Listowel, and discovers that for many years her husband has had a secret life, a life that includes having fathered a child. One of the finest stories in the collection, “Archeologists,” features Robert and Emma as the two professionals of the title. They have slowed production on a construction project because they’ve discovered some ancient artifacts. The act of digging up the historical past eventually becomes a metaphor for the wreckage of their own personal past.
Gemlike stories that focus on contemporary issues in Ireland.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59020-030-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
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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