A touching, often poignant, debut collection of fiction by a Native American writer. Sarris (English/UCLA; Keeping Slug Woman Alive, not reviewed) offers 10 linked short stories describing the milieu of the Pomo Indians (from whom he is descended) in the small coastal California town of Santa Rosa (Sarris himself is chairman of the Coastal Miwok tribe). Though the people described no longer live on the reservation, they still live together, congregated in a collection of old WW IIera barracks in an Indian ghetto around the street of the title. All of the nine narrators (two stories are told by the same teller) are related, part of the family of Juana Maria. Some are young; others are old and near death. All experience poverty and dislocation. The majority are strong-voiced women. A girl tells the story of how her unbalanced cousin Ruby struggled valiantly but hopelessly to save a crippled pony from the slaughterhouse. A mother watches her daughter wither away under the onslaught of leukemia. A daughter reminisces about her mother, who worked as a maid for a well-to-do white family and longed for acceptance by her own family. The importance of family and acceptance lie at the heart of many of the stories. A father writes secret letters to the son he never knew he had. An old woman clings to a newfound relationship with the granddaughter of a family member she thinks she let down, and as she does, the innocence of youth chips away at the jadedness of age. The story cycle as a whole follows a subtle trajectory: It begins with hatred, rejection, and despair and ends with hope and belonging. Often, however, there is one step backward for every two steps forward. Sarris sets himself a difficult task and accomplishes it well. Without being mawkish or sentimental, he creates a variety of voices—male and female—who tell the struggles of a people and their determination to survive. (Film rights to HBO; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 2, 1994
ISBN: 0-7868-6017-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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
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