One definitely to follow.
Ten debut stories explore the challenges and meaning of modern Judaism.
“The Tenth” tells of an aging rabbi who is forced to confront the circus of modern faith when a set of Siamese twins helps fill out the required number for the minyan, while a far from pious rebbe (“But who was he kidding, pretending to piety when he couldn’t even tell a simple story to a dying man or sit next to a woman on a bus” without having lewd thoughts?) is assigned the task of comforting an AIDS patient in “How to Comfort the Sick and Dying.” “The Lament of the Rabbi’s Daughters” follows four young women who explode in various anti-Jewish directions (ashram, acting, ambiguity) when they reach adulthood, coming together again only when the one who has disappeared suddenly resurfaces. A Russian (“Meziovsky”) and a Jew have to search long and hard for common ground of any kind when they find themselves living as neighbors in an America that is equally forgetting of both their cultures. And the moral of “The Diviners of Desire: A Modern Fable” asks what the hybrid of contemporary culture and Jewish matchmaking does to the practice of love. Leegant demonstrates talent and flexibility, hindered perhaps only by her seeming compulsion to stick to a rigid and ultimately repetitive platform. Her voice sometimes becomes so secular that the bleed into the comedic lilt of Jewish rhetoric can seem more imitation than depiction. Still, this is a wide and varied talent that may need the longer form to find its direction and boundaries. Here, the attention is well focused on the unknowableness of a fading faith: “It was all a mystery. Who knew why they did anything except in the exact moment of its doing? Once it was done it was past, the flash of certainty vanished; any attempt afterward to explain was a pale guess, nostalgia.”
One definitely to follow.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-05439-X
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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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