Occasionally affecting moments too often succumb to airy, meandering writing.
An impressionistic portrait of hardscrabble life on a Wyoming ranch.
Henry’s debut is a linked story collection centered on the Davis clan, a family of ranchers led by Spencer, a hard-driving patriarch who hasn’t shaken off the psychological wounds of World War II. As the book opens, he’s a young college student who’s just decided to marry his girlfriend, Elizabeth, on the East Coast, but he quickly abandons his Cambridge “book learning” to head back west to handle horses and raise two sons, Luke and Whitney. One of the better pieces, “Tomatoes,” describes the two boys as precocious pre-teens, stealing pies and ruining sheets hung out to dry by using them as strike zones for pitched tomatoes. Their inevitable punishment reveals the intense labor the land requires, paralleled by the intensity of Spencer’s war memories. As the boys mature, the theme of the danger inherent in daily living intensifies: In “Hands,” the men move horses in a painfully bitter winter storm, while the closing “Yet Still of the Heart” adds a tragic note, suggesting just how hard nature pushes back against efforts to control it. Henry is working the same territory as Thomas McGuane, Annie Proulx and Kent Haruf, though his ambitions aren’t nearly as broad—the bulk of the eight pieces in this slim book are more like sketches than full-blooded stories, rendering a particular moment instead of cultivating nuanced connections among the family members. (Elizabeth in particular gets short shrift—the implication is that this is stubbornly manly territory.) More frustrating than the slight plots, though, is the derivative, weak prose. Henry works in a deliberately Faulknerian mode, stretching out sentences that routinely reference the inexorability and indomitability of the people, land and animals. But the high-flown language and run-on sentences mostly just swallow up the thin plots Henry has devised, leaving the impression of an author working too hard to give these stories gravitas.
Occasionally affecting moments too often succumb to airy, meandering writing.Pub Date: June 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6941-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
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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