These characters, along with others equally on edge, give voice to the ceaseless yearnings that—so Kane’s volume...
Eleven downbeat stories, five published previously, from newcomer Kane: blues variations that form an insistent but eloquent study of faces of quiet desperation.
There are the drinkers: Sarah, first, in “Evidence of Old Repairs,” whose efforts to connect with her teenaged daughter while on a family holiday in London are complicated by the memories both have of Sarah’s rum-and-Coke afternoons at home; and then Shelley, in “Refuge,” an aging associate in a prominent Washington law firm, who attends the firm’s weekend retreat days after having sent her teenager away to live with his dad, no longer able to cope with him, and who binges her way through the pain. And there are the seekers: The mathematician in “The Arnold Proof,” at 46 close to the twilight of his career, close to cracking the proof of the notorious Riemann Hypothesis, but also closer than ever to cracking up when he has an epiphany in an interstate rest area; and the publicist in “How to Become a Publicist,” a midwestern girl lured by New York publishing, who quickly tires of the inanity of it all and applies to grad school. And then there are those for whom objects have assumed unnatural significance: Lena in “Ideas of Home, but Not the Thing Itself,” a newlywed who covets the furnishings of the Georgetown house she and her young husband are sitting; and the young boy in “First Sale,” faced with his mother’s determination to get rid of stuff after his father leaves them, but who cannot bear to part with a bottle of Maryland lake water he had scooped up at the end of a family vacation.
These characters, along with others equally on edge, give voice to the ceaseless yearnings that—so Kane’s volume suggests—preoccupy us almost from the cradle to the grave. Lovers of lighthearted fiction, fear to tread here.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-58243-206-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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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