A first collection of 12 stories, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award for 1997. Henry's young characters decry the existential angst of the generation that preceded theirs, and yet often end up embracing it. In ``Mouthfeel,'' for instance, a married couple seems to have a happy future, until the wife begins to see pointlessness all around her and goes mad—the implication seeming to be that madness may be a sane response to a culture obsessed with throw-away goods, meaningless sex, and money that can never buy happiness. In the strange ``Motherhurt,'' Henry highlights depression in ordinary surroundings by wildly exaggerating the rituals that families go through to cheer up their own—in this case, a mother. The rituals begin to seem extreme, even bizarre. Henry appears to want to argue that insanity is only what we say it is, and that ``normal'' behavior is never far from insanity. ``Congressman Spoonbender,'' told in an exact, detached style, concerns an aging congressman who's losing his sense of purpose. He calls his mistress back in Ohio, who's drunk and getting drunker, to find his bearings, but she can't help, can't even understand him. Finally, Henry takes a rather maudlin turn in ``The Prodigal Corpse,'' in which the narrator's father returns from the grave to make a few astringent comments about life and death and to settle one score with his wife, who for 20 years was afraid of the word ``penis.'' After he's made her say the word, he's content to return to the grave. Ann Beattie, final judge for the award, compares Henry's sense of humor to Donald Barthelme's, and there is indeed a kind of skewed, grim, and even misanthropic comedy lurking here that may be what gives most promise to this debut.
Pub Date: Oct. 27, 1997
ISBN: 0-87745-610-0
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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