A skillful collection of stories featuring beguiling plots and characters.
A moving debut collection of stories about the underside of ordinary relationships.
In this collection, husbands and wives, fathers and sons, and mothers and daughters yearn to stretch beyond their family units. Throughout, Orbach focuses on strained relationships and transgressions—the threatening steps that people take across unspoken boundaries. The author has a flair for character, and even her shortest stories pulsate with vibrant people who are smart enough to know where their actions might lead. In “Crossing Over,” Martha and Jerry, both divorced from others, take their first road trip as a new couple. They drive in uneasy silence until Martha presses Jerry about his divorce-court proceedings and stirs up once-settled emotions: “Suddenly she imagines them seated backward in the speeding car, their faces not toward the road ahead but turned helplessly toward the ruined landscape behind them.” In “Snow Falling on Upstate New York,” Alec reflects on his childhood, his three siblings, his asthmatic, alcoholic mother, and his father, “trudging doggedly” to maintain a semblance of normalcy. A subsequent story recalls the same family from a different point of view: Alec’s younger sister, Miranda, finds refuge from her mother’s alcoholism in the colorful kitchen and easy conversation of her friend’s family. Although she should seek comfort from her classmate, she’s instead drawn to her classmate’s mother—and their summer relationship shapes Miranda’s life. Miranda’s self-awareness and discerning morality—typical of Orbach’s characters—bring depth to the relatively short story. Indeed, many characters seem too large for their stories—they nudge against their stories’ ends, threatening yet another boundary. Miranda’s tale, for example, like many in this fine collection, stops too quickly, too neatly, for the brilliance of her personality: “That’s all I want to say about that summer or any other.”
A skillful collection of stories featuring beguiling plots and characters.Pub Date: July 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-1475980479
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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