Weak stories, artificial people, real horses.
First-timer Shepard writes here about people and horses: far more convincingly so with the horses.
A sentimental opener that strains credulity (“First Day She’d Never See”) is about a drug user who sells his last possession, his car, named for his drug-dead girlfriend. Readers can be pardoned, here and elsewhere, for demanding more weight and depth in Shepard’s people—as in the man in “Flaw in the Shelter” who, predictably, slips off the pitch of a roof and hangs there after trying to get a bird out of the chimney, counseling the while that “Immediacy was the only thing . . . worth recognizing as truth.” A young couple whose marriage is collapsing (“In the Open”) are so utterly unprepossessing—he shallow, she bitchy—that they’re just hooks to hang a story on, and the same is true in “We’ll Talk Later,” about a California couple trying to adapt to life in Virginia: a sorrow in the woman’s past is intended to give weight but fails to, remaining unrealized, while the husband, an independent filmmaker, is barely a cipher, however self-impressed he may be. The two getting married in “Blinkers” achieve no significance in themselves but are simply an excuse for a horse-drawn wedding procession to be described: the day is hot, the mountainside is steep, and a carriage-horse dies of a heart attack—one of the most vivid scenes in the book, for, as said, Shepard is clearly best at horses. In “Night Shot,” the type-cast cowboys are ignorable, but the uneasy horses they’re in charge of on a movie set are vivid, charactered, and real, and the same is true—both of horses and cowboys—in “Thirty Head of Killers.” The closest to a fictional balance between man and beast is in the title story, about an old man trying to prove a horse’s lineage by disinterring one of its parents for DNA testing.
Weak stories, artificial people, real horses.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-58234-340-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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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