If only Schmidt had kept her pace smart-alecky and feline-wise, rather than letting it peter impotently out.
Following on her first collection, The Rose Thieves (1990), Schmidt offers a generally lackluster gathering of ten tales, though with a few standouts that are fresh and cracklingly funny takes on modern womanhood
Schmidt is at her top in the first person, and even better when skewering an intimate relationship at close quarters, like one between glowering spouses or between a slavishly resentful adult child and father. The first two stories, both from the point of view of a longtime wife demonstrating bitterly depleted spiritual forces, set a dry, deadpan tone (which is, disappointingly, never regained elsewhere in the collection). In “Songbirds,” Francine, a successful artist reeling from her husband’s rejection, descends on her derivative younger sister Etta’s provincial domicile outside of Venice, where, to escape her overachieving sister, she has married a traditional Italian and vengefully settled for the life of full-time wife and mother. (Schmidt can’t resist bursting into the narrative with righteous exclamations in the face of Francine’s sense of being shut out by both her husband and sister: “What’s more erotic than one’s own darling self?”) In the title story, Daisy, a woman living outside of Boston, with her “rages and despairs listed on a notecard,” falls madly in love with her psychologist, who becomes a best-selling author and darling of TV interviewers. Daisy’s language of exasperated adoration, coupled with the therapist’s weary, textbook explanations, is wildly out-of-synch to hilarious, memorable effect. Other stories take on more somber tones, such as “Blood Poison,” about the neediness between a failing father and his lone, wary daughter, and the final “Funeral Party,” which sorts through a shattered family’s dignity in the wake of an artist son’s suicide.
If only Schmidt had kept her pace smart-alecky and feline-wise, rather than letting it peter impotently out.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28178-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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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