Overall, a disappointing first collection.
Novelist Dufresne (Deep in the Shade of Paradise, 2002, etc.) meanders through 18 stories, set mostly in Florida’s Broward County, offering a spot of charm but little by way of real satisfaction.
The title story, the most substantial of the lot, is a rambling account of Hurricane Fritzy’s approach to the Florida coast as the narrator, his estranged girlfriend, Annick, and his undisciplined dog Spot remain among those who do not evacuate (“it’s futile to think what if? about your life, but I’ve been doing it since I was a kid”). Dufresne’s ruminating, associative, plot-resistant narrative manner is, at its best, casual and neighborly, but more frequently it’s just plain slow. About a third of the stories are too sketchy to bear up under scrutiny—two- to three-page bits that deliver little. The least appealing is the fragment “Breaking It Down for You,” with a man whining that he was “provoked” to explain why he killed his girlfriend’s two-year-old. “Talk Talk Talk,” weightier, spans the 30 years of the marriage of an unfaithful wife and the man who stays with her despite her affairs. As she lies dying, the husband thinks, “You don’t walk out on responsibility. You take heart.” The suspenseful “Based on a True Story,” about Curtis, who kills a couple of women who irritate him, is told primarily in list form: “7. Curtis’s wealthy and connected parents hire a costly and brilliant attorney from Shreveport to defend him,” for example, or “9. The charming, gifted and handsome attorney is struck by lightning and killed. (Truth is stranger than fiction).” This approach moves the action along quickly as, in chilling fashion, it illuminates a psychopathic killer driving an inebriated young woman home. The two strongest stories—“Johnny Too Bad” and “Squeeze the Feeling” (Annick becomes pregnant, then loses the baby)—stand out for their sharply observed portrait of a man’s wistful connections to his carefree dog and to the independent woman in his life.
Overall, a disappointing first collection.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-393-05789-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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