Too elliptical, lyrical—and ordinary—to resonate.
Thinly drawn characters in tales that celebrate the lyrically evocative insights defining women’s lives.
Reflecting a take on marriage that’s become a truism—the women write poems or keep journals, but don’t have careers, their lives having been ordered by their relationships with men as two-dimensional as they are—these 14 pieces range in setting from Italy to the American West. And though Coleman's people have different names, they tend to be interchangeable symbols of women of extraordinary sensibility and the men who either limit them or offer escape. In the title story, a much-married sculptor, a hostage of his emotions and perceptions who has been seeking a woman who understands him, meets a colleague’s wife—a woman who, loving flowers, understood “the delights of loving—who likewise needed, who likewise gave praise but voiced it differently.” The young wife in “Una Bella Figura” is reminded on a visit to the now-aging couple who had accompanied her and her stodgy husband on their Italian honeymoon, of a moment of beauty and freedom before all the compromises of life took over. Another woman, a published poet, now old and dying, recalls in “Discovering Eve” how a meeting 40 years ago with a dying priest, when she felt overwhelmed by marriage and family, gave her the courage to start writing. Others, after marriages fail or become strained, find meaning by moving back to the remote family farm and finding there a man who understands (“Windfall”); by living alone out west and caring for the land because ties of the heart are what matter (“Blood Ties”); or by studying the insects of a swamp (“The Lover of Swamps”). A young girl who spies on her bachelor neighbor (“The Balducci Garden”) as he makes love to Renata, a friend of her aunt’s, learns and understands “the menace, the inexpressible beauty of love.”
Too elliptical, lyrical—and ordinary—to resonate.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7862-4307-4
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Five Star/Gale Cengage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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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