Next book

The Blue Hole and Other Stories

A thoughtful collection in which the strongest stories are the most understated.

Short stories that explore turning points in people’s lives, often from a working-class point of view.

The title of one of Hendrix’s (Tour of Duty, 2012) 14 short pieces, “Seminal Moments,” could stand for most of the others. Each captures a pivotal experience, whether of a boy gaining new understanding of himself (“The Blue Hole”), an old man making a grim decision (“Life Along the Mississippi”) or a couple understanding their relationship is truly over (“The Pier at Nature’s Point”). The stories’ points of view are mostly masculine, with “Patty” a notable exception (“The Attic” includes both male and female viewpoints). Many take place in a timeless American past, often in the South, where everyone has short, plain names such as Mike, Tom, Linda or Bill. The stories’ adults are mostly working-class—a bricklayer, a small-business owner, a soldier—and several are like John in “Following the Trade”: “Hard work was something he knew from childhood. It was a way of life, and he knew no other.” In one of the most successful stories, “Hullaballoo,” Buck, a civil engineer, doesn’t even think of himself in white-collar terms; what’s important to him is working “shoulder to shoulder with other men, their work talk, the sounds of heavy equipment running.” These bring him “a sense of ease and a clear head. As long as there was hullaballoo, he was fine.” Hendrix shows a talent for dialogue when he captures the rhythms of the loud, busy bar where Buck hangs out. He also skillfully brings out Buck’s need for noise and movement, and when Buck tells the bartender that he can help with some work by saying, “I’m available,” the words capture Buck’s world of lonely extroversion. That said, a few stories are less subtle and thus less successful, such as the title story, which reads like a boy’s heroic fantasy of saving someone’s life.

A thoughtful collection in which the strongest stories are the most understated. 

Pub Date: March 3, 2014

ISBN: 978-1492961321

Page Count: 230

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: July 13, 2014

Categories:
Next book

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

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

Categories:
Next book

SIGHTSEEING

STORIES

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

Close Quickview