A rough life delivered roughly.
Eleven debut stories from a middle-aged, of-the-masses, school-of-hard-knocks autodidact.
The roughhewn feel of these tales is both their strength and their weakness. Just as often as they revel in honesty sublime and undecorated, they falter as stories trying to stand alone. The best of the bunch is the title piece, a tale of men down on their luck, finding work in an orange grove where they can eat the fruit that has fallen but not that on the trees, and their banter is reminiscent of the men immortalized in the first section of Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. Another tale, first published in Esquire (“The Rain Barrel”), is the haunting account of a family vying for a father’s inheritance before old age kills him. Others include “Magic,” about a man who doesn’t bother to keep track of the number of times he’s been to jail—he wanders from bars where waitresses sing karaoke to bridges where it takes four seconds for the stones he throws over the edge (as an experiment) to hit bottom; “Jon-Clod,” in which a boy learns the ambivalence of familial love as he learns of a new baby on the way and follows his father into a snowy evening toward epiphany; “Mackerel,” a self-referential tale about an instructor of war fiction experiencing a different sort of vet’s alienation when he gives his own story to an uninterested class; and “Jade,” a portrait of a Vietnam vet trying to escape his memories by hunting in the Maine woods but finding there only an unlikely other with whom he can reenact certain horrors. Even as these tales please, better examples of similar stories come to mind, and one wishes Nichols had studied craft more, relied less on experience as substitute for another kind of learning.
A rough life delivered roughly.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2002
ISBN: 0-88748-379-8
Page Count: 174
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
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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