One of America’s most underrated, important writers, Scott gets better with every book. A must-read.
The prolific, protean Scott’s latest is a collection of ten thematically linked stories that comprise an episodic history of love in the previous century.
The author’s pictorial imagination and gift for narrative economy are vividly displayed in the opening story, “Heaven and Hell,” which offers glimpses into the hearts and minds of members of a 1919 wedding: the demonstrably happy couple, the bride’s ne’er-do-well father, the benevolent uncle who assumes the latter’s responsibilities—even a burly retriever that chases a stick, endangering the life of the boy who throws it. It’s a precisely exfoliating anatomy of the pleasures—and perils—of marital love. The subsequent story, “Stumble,” is an examination of the wasted life of an “easy” girl who seeks happiness in promiscuous sex, and “Worry” looks at maternal love through the story of a warmhearted matron whose children seek risks that will free them from her smothering protectiveness. In “Freeze-Out,” meanwhile, “love at first sight” exposes a self-pitying retiree to the wiles of a family of amoral cardsharps. In the collection’s finest story, “Across from the Shannonso,” a bored apartment dweller can neither explain nor understand her eagerness “to sacrifice her father . . . for the sake of a hoodlum boy” whom her imagination has transformed from an arsonist’s accomplice into a brooding romantic soul. Scott concludes with two ambitious, only partially successful, experiments: a mordant novella, “Or Else,” which imagines four contrasting consequences for its unloved protagonist’s childhood traumas; and a gathering of several brief incidents, “The Lucite Cane,” in which love propels its variously connected characters into fateful chance meetings. Throughout, the author’s abilities to concoct arresting premises instill a quirky sense of menace and enrich her narratives with metaphoric and allegorical implication that keeps the reader riveted to the page.
One of America’s most underrated, important writers, Scott gets better with every book. A must-read.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2006
ISBN: 0-316-01345-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Back Bay/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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