As is, not Neugeboren’s best, though a judicious pruning might have helped.
An uneven third collection from Neugeboren, author of seven novels and two memoirs (Open Heart: A Patient’s Story of Life-Saving Medicine and Life-Giving Friendship, 2003, etc.).
A gushing, memoirish preface about “the making of stories” and an extended Note on the Dedication (to a long-lost relative) mar the opening and foreshadow the volume’s virtues and flaws. The best of the dozen stories (“Good in Bed,” about a “word-smart” professor in the preliminary rounds of a divorce; “His Violin,” about a denizen of Century Village in Palm Beach who passes along a family secret in gratitude to his favorite nephew, a lawyer who handled the details of his brother’s funeral; and “Poppa’s Books,” about a narrator who shows how much he treasures his immigrant father’s precious library, only to be chastised by his mother) are cleanly written and close to the bone. Others are disjointed, unfocused and sentimental, like “The American Sun & Wind Moving Company,” about a young man who’s out of his depth as an auteur in the family enterprise of making a movie near an icy lake in Fort Lee, N.J., in November 1915; and “The Golden Years,” about two brothers visiting the set of a film being made in their Florida retirement “village.” The story of a “profoundly inhibited” 40-something divorcée keeps a promise to herself to visit the death camps if she and her children “survived one another” after her husband left (“This Third Life”) is both ambitious and yet slight. The title piece follows a rabbi through a day as he deals with a variety of dilemmas while bearing the knowledge that he and his wife have had a bitter battle. He renews his faith in the teachings of the Torah, opens his mind and then his heart to his wife and community in a transformation that reminds us what a master storyteller Neugeboren can be.
As is, not Neugeboren’s best, though a judicious pruning might have helped.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-292-70661-8
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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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