Reading the stories in this volume in rapid succession is akin to consuming an entire chocolate cake in one sitting; it...
Connor’s latest collection of short stories explores both the highs and lows of letting go of love.
In a well-crafted collection that ranges from funny to poignant to the absurd, Connor takes on everything from an infatuation with the UPS man ("Men In Brown") to an alcoholic’s obsession with Janis Joplin ("The Landmark Hotel"). "Men in Brown," the lead story, chronicles a self-imposed recluse’s growing obsession with her UPS delivery guy, with whom she strikes up a conversation about books. The UPS guy reads and is impressed by a woman who also reads. In order to keep him coming back, she obsessively orders things she neither needs nor wants, but can’t seem to interact with him face-to-face. Connor resolves that impasse in a memorable, laugh-out-loud Lucy Ricardo moment. In "What It Is," the author follows an older woman whose hopes of turning a long-distance romance into something real fade faster than a bouquet of cut flowers as she and the man she longs for close the geographical distance between them, then find that expectations often fall short of reality. "Halfbaby" spirits readers inside the mind of an unusual woman leading an unusual life in a remote island community. The sea and shoreline are frequent settings in this collection, and Connor proves herself adept at making both the settings and the emotions of her characters palpable. Sometimes she excels ("The Writing on the Wall"), and at other times she does not ("Palimpsest"). She is an excellent wordsmith who understands the power of language, the same qualities that make the stories so compelling also serve on occasion to irritate and frustrate the reader: Arcane language, nouns implausibly pressed into service as verbs, never-ending descriptions and an overabundance of clever wordplay turn the book into the written equivalent of a buffet overloaded with rich foods.
Reading the stories in this volume in rapid succession is akin to consuming an entire chocolate cake in one sitting; it proves much tastier when cut into smaller slices.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 9781-935248-20-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Leapfrog
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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