A talent still emerging and perhaps impeded by a preimagined vision of itself.
You know you’re a redneck when there are so many of you trying to be outsiders that Barnes & Noble gives you your own section in the store.
It’s hard to identify the individual talent of debut writer Davis, this year’s Iowa Short Fiction Award winner, who, in trying to pin down an unexplored Alabama, seems also compelled to use the style of various southern masters as if to prove that she’s in complete command of her literary heritage. The first piece, “Rewriting Girl,” captures the whole idea, in a way—we hear the tale of a ravishing redneck girl, often written about, but finally now writing her own story. “Some Things Collide” is about a girl who runs off to Florida to escape a lump in her breast, only to encounter quicker forms of death and the knowledge that wisdom, too, grows like a tumor. No southern collection, it seems, would be complete without a tale told by an idiot: The only appeal of “Only Ends” is its semiretarded voice suspended somewhere between Faulkner and Forrest Gump. Davis explores the difficult lives of women (“The One Thing God’ll Give You”) in a world where all the men are named Fast Eddie and have clever similes for women’s private parts. Similarly, “Pojo’s and the Buttery Slope” is about a down-home woman with a dead husband who’s trying to find another, in the process learning that owning a man means you’re empty-handed. Davis is talented and flexible, but her vision of the South too often boils down to women acting rampantly promiscuous while they worry about looking like whores.
A talent still emerging and perhaps impeded by a preimagined vision of itself.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-87745-818-9
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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