A novella and four stories that earned newcomer Grossinger the 15th annual Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction. While not of the ``Cancer in Connecticut'' school of new fiction, Grossinger's besieged characters succumb with enough regularity to form their own subgenre—the ``Bright's Disease in the Bronx'' school, perhaps—and to keep the proceedings mostly funereal throughout. In ``Dinosaurs,'' a midwestern academic reminisces about his grandfather Zolly, who has just passed on. ``Leisure World'' is a portrait of the spites and affections of elderly retirees living out their last days in Florida, whereas ``Hearts and Minds'' describes the disintegration of a Vietnam vet from the perspective of his teenaged son. ``Home Burial'' focuses on madness rather than death, offering a boy's account of his POW father who nearly died in Korea and has never really recovered. Like most of the book, ``Home Burial'' is marred by Grossinger's unwillingness to let the plot speak for itself, especially in its more melancholy moments—``He held me in his sad gaze for more than a minute, and the feel of his dog tags against my face and chest when I hugged him has remained with me for all these years''—and its sentimentality becomes cloying very quickly. The most ambitious work in the collection, the title novella, is more nuanced. It describes a Jewish boy's changing sense of identity and history as a result of his contact with a family of Holocaust survivors who move into his hometown in the late 1940s. Relying on the perspective of the survivors themselves, as well as on the narrator who observes them, the story has a depth and subtlety that the others lack. Painfully sincere: Grossinger gives the game away time and again by showing his hand—which isn't bad—too soon.
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8203-1896-5
Page Count: 265
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
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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