Coleman's second collection (after Stories from Mesa Country, 1991): mostly delicate explorations of the passage of adolescents into adulthood and of married women into the complexities of adultery or disenchantment. In the first section here, ``The Balducci Garden,'' the narrator of the title story comes of age sexually by voyeuristically observing the Balducci brothers who live next door to her grandmother. The central metaphor is an apt one—the narrator breaks stones apart to find ``the hidden beauty'' of their crystalline centers. This sort of metaphor-cum-sketch is the dominant pattern here—Coleman relies on her poetic prose to carry readers instead of fully developing her plots—and, usually, it works. In the second section, ``The Age of Insects,'' the title story is about a woman who, along with her husband, baby, and shallow mother-in-law, comes upon a beached whale and learns of the callousness of humans. In ``The Lover of Swamps,'' a poet—married to a naturalist but in love with someone else—develops ``an affinity with the swamp.'' In ``Glasnost,'' a woman of 40 comes to see how she's ``lived more than half [her] life as a robot.'' The third section, ``Wives and Lovers,'' begins with the delicate story of a sculptor who falls in love with a woman in a house where he's a temporary guest and who learns from her how to see. In ``Compromising Alice,'' Alice, after 15 years of marriage to jerk George, divorces him to consider whether or not to marry thoughtful Henry. And ``La Signora Julia'' is about a famous physicist's student who develops a crush on the man's wife and meditates on how incompatible people manage to stay together before learning, later, that the man's wife has left him. Coleman, at best, displays the easy poetic grace of an Alice Munro. Even when sketchy, her lyricism usually saves the day.
Pub Date: May 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-8040-0964-3
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Ohio Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
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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