Next book

BATTING AGAINST CASTRO

STORIES

With four fine novels (Kiss of the Wolf, 1994, etc.) to his credit, Shepard seems to be something of a writer's writer—he's rightly admired by critics and his peers, but a wider readership has yet to develop. This first collection of 14 expert tales could easily be the work to gain Shepard greater visibility—it's smart, economical, and each story displays that most elusive quality: integrity. The volume is divided into two sections, one on ``strangers,'' the other on ``family.'' The first group impresses with its wide array of distinctive, convincing voices. In the title story, a former major-league ballplayer takes a job in pre-revolutionary Cuba, where the championship series prefigures the Cold War. Another jock, the narrator of ``Messiah,'' unsparingly describes his maniacal teammate, a female-abusing, violent superstar. A short piece, ``Reach for the Sky,'' unerringly brings to life an animal- shelter worker who thanklessly deals with the erstwhile owners of abandoned dogs; another captures the self-defining lingo of fighter pilots (``Who We Are, What We're Doing''). Other voices Shepard channels include a clueless adolescent girl on a mission to uplift a poor friend (``Spending the Night with the Poor''), and in a memoiristic tale, German director F.W. Murnau during the making of his epochal film Nosferatu. The stories in the family section explore such things as the nature and particulars of growing up ethnic and Catholic, the struggles to communicate within a family, and the painful loss of loved ones. The effect of an Italian grandmother's death is traced in ``Touch of the Dead''; ``Eustace'' is nothing less than a Catholic version of Philip Roth's great story ``Conversion of the Jews'': A parochial schoolboy infuriates nuns with his persistent, troubling questions. And ``Mars Attacks,'' one of several wrenching pieces about brothers, uses a wrangle over that infamous trading-card series to chronicle the difficult relations of two siblings. A virtuoso collection.

Pub Date: June 6, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-44668-0

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996

Categories:
Next book

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

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

Categories:
Next book

SIGHTSEEING

STORIES

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

Close Quickview