Raucous and full of bristling energy.
Newcomer Reinhorn offers a dozen accomplished stories set on the West Coast.
In “My Name,” an orderly at Salem State working on a “floor full of yowling oldies” makes a favorite of Verta, who is catatonic and unable to speak as a result of her son’s death in Vietnam. Taking care of her, the narrator finds himself drawn back to memories of his own losses in that war. “Good to Hear You” presents the eerily ordinary day spent by the narrator’s father, living in Memphis with his young second wife, enjoying a retirement habit of painting watercolors. The catch: it’s September 11, 2001, he has not listened to the radio, and when he sets up his easel and begins painting a skyscraper, he is sent packing by a security guard. “The Heights” describes a woman who entertains the friends of “whatever doctor she’s been courting” after their golf games on Monday afternoons. One day her teenage daughter appears at the doorway with her father, a stroke victim, in his wheelchair, and is made party to a drunken conversation that reveals more than she wants to know about her parents’ early life. In “By the Time You Get This,” a Los Angeles psychiatrist and her husband prepare to sell their house in the wake of their only daughter’s suicide in the hot tub. “Get Away from Me, David” puts an inexperienced bank manager in charge when a small earthquake hits, shocking one of the customers into a heart attack. The title story portrays two teenaged girls who work themselves into a full-throttled fight in front of the lion cage at the zoo where they have summer jobs. Less satisfying is “Last Seen,” the story of a high-school senior who disappears, set forth in documentary fragments. But each of these pieces is distinguished by Reinhorn’s acute ear for the vernacular and fresh take on the human condition.
Raucous and full of bristling energy.Pub Date: July 6, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-7294-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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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