Stories that tiptoe artfully along the edge of credibility, seldom failing to astonish as much as they entertain.
Playful inventiveness and a fluid prose style reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh at his most antic distinguish this debut collection of 15 unusually varied stories.
Several lift characters from familiar literary sources: notably, Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter, who’s chosen by a bachelor patron of the dating service “Literary Lonelyhearts”; the blind seer Teiresias, who conducts tours of the Oedipus Museum (in “Chez Oedipus”); and “Lady Macbeth, Prickly Pear Queen,” whose old habits inconveniently resurface following her marriage to an ardent young fruit magnate. There are also echoes of Borges, Beckett, Kafka, and especially early T.C. Boyle in such parabolic tales as “Life in Dearth,” whose heroine’s discovery of sex reveals to her the emptiness of her native village’s insularity and pride; “The Census Taker,” which records the collision of an exacting civil servant with a woman unwilling “to be counted”; and “The Charwoman,” an ironic paean to the pleasures of unconventional behavior, which also includes a hilarious parody of a proper Victorian upbringing. Avrich ransacks history in the clever title piece, a scholar’s lament for mankind’s lapse from times when the devout poor “happily endured injury and starvation,” enabling the building of marvels like the great cathedral at Chartres—and foresees dystopian futures in “Trash Traders” (where exchanges of what people throw away cause wholesale identity crises); and “Waiting Rooms,” an acerbic sex comedy about a man-hunting woman whose failure to find the complete package (so to speak) is foreshadowed by an alarming profusion of prosthetic devices. Even better are “The Braid,” narrated by a paternally trained cat burglar who finds a way to assert her independence; and “The Banshee’s Song,” about an ugly-duckling daughter who’s compensated for her miseries by an energizing, troubling ability “to see into the spirit world.”
Stories that tiptoe artfully along the edge of credibility, seldom failing to astonish as much as they entertain.Pub Date: June 12, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-25142-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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