Fifteen polished stories by the veteran author of, most recently, a deeply felt memoir of his brother, Imagining Robert (1997). In the title piece, a surgeon named Michael has a cup of coffee with the man appointed by the court to investigate his broken marriage and determine custody arrangements. Neugeboren cunningly orders things so that, at first, the reader sympathizes with Michael, then slowly comes to realize that he's been a bit of a monster. The same persona—a smart, professional, newly divorced man—appears several times here. In ``Tolstoy in Maine,'' a highly successful filmmaker is hiding from himself in a seacoast town. He, too, has recently gone through a divorce, and misses his kids, and feels his ex-wife lied about him. In the town, he meets a beautiful divorcÇe who draws him out and loves him tenderly, only to disappear in the morning. Then Neugeboren offers her story, too, and the pathos of her disappearance turns romantic—and hopeful. He also takes romance about as far as a realistic writer can in the imaginative ``What Is the Good Life?,'' a spy story set in France. Neugeboren reflects on Grace Kelly both as an actress and a princess in the voice of a Grace Kellylike character who's killed by an assassin after an impossibly romantic love affair. The amusing ``In Memory of Jane Fogarty'' concerns a psychiatrist who receives half a million dollars in insurance money when a patient of hers dies in a plane crash. The patient named her as sole beneficiary, but his parents are having none of it. A court battle is about to ensue, making the reader wonder who's crazier: the dead man, or all the people fighting for his money? Neugeboren's sensibilities are exclusively northeastern and upper-middle class, which probably describes his readers as well. This time, he gives them their money's worth, and then some.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-55849-113-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997
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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