An argument for the abolition of writing programs.
Stories about young women caught between cultures, not knowing which way to turn.
It would be unfortunately easy, however apt, to categorize Lieu’s d collection as just another tiny little book by an MFA-armed writer, come to the table with years of training, a work that can’t be faulted for technique or any lack of skill but that just doesn’t have anything to say. The title story sets the tone for what follows, with its half-white, half-Chinese young woman going with her mother to see (or perhaps protest) a Ku Klux Klan rally in a small Indiana town near the woman’s college. While the writing is skillful, limning the odd surrealism that always surrounds such an event (the handful of puffy racists pathetically hemmed in by a small army of police and protestors), the piece itself is blunt and more than a little patronizing. The closing novella, “Always a Descendent,” improves on much of the rest of the collection only in that Lieu actually gives herself time to flesh out some of her characters, especially Pearl, the wonderfully perplexing great-aunt to the story’s ubiquitous half-Chinese protagonist. Like the title story, this one has at its disposal a cranky old woman who manages to upset all the carefully nuanced plot devices around her—though unfortunately that’s not enough to make for worthwhile reading. Lieu’s obvious talent is mostly wasted on these thin and repetitious tales that seem all to blend together after a time, with the exception of “Safety.” While not exactly a masterpiece, it’s nevertheless quite notable because, as a 1960s story set in the Southwest, where a woman is taught how to use a gun by her boyfriend’s friend, it at least leaves the hermetically sealed, MFA-approved world the rest of the volume is safely ensconced in.
An argument for the abolition of writing programs.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-55597-397-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
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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