A highly uneven but ultimately worthwhile collection.
More scenes of the South in this story collection from Davis (Her Kind of Want, 2002).
In “Ava Bean,” a scarred woman hoping to build a new life nurses an old racist who may herself be black, and she has drunken, joyless sex with a terrifying man. In “Rapture,” a sheltered and disappointed woman has a sort of spiritual awakening after a brief and tawdry erotic encounter with a stranger during a hurricane. In “Blue Moon,” an Elvis impersonator finds that the King is enough when she loses her best friend to Jesus. Squalor, violence, Elvis: These are shoddy souvenirs from the Southern Lit gift shop, and Davis leaves them as tacky and tired as she found them. The quirky juxtapositions feel just as shopworn, and the epiphanies are cheap, too. But several of these stories rise above the level of kitsch, and some would be outstanding even in much better company. “Pilgrimage in Georgia”—the tale of a failed writer in love with a romanticized version of the South—is a sharp, funny meditation on art, authenticity and longing. “Detritus” is a lovely fable in which the themes of poverty, craziness and fundamentalist faith are depicted with clear-eyed dignity and a luminous grace. The title story describes a father's attempt to connect with his strange son, a little boy who draws eerily accurate pictures of Civil War scenes that lead a family therapist to suggest that he was a Confederate soldier in a past life. The father's confusion and frustrated love are rendered with a poignant realism that grounds the story's fantastic elements, and the result is an exemplary piece of short fiction.
A highly uneven but ultimately worthwhile collection.Pub Date: July 17, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7352-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
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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