A rich display of the varied skills of one of our finest writers.
Fluid structures and tensely contained emotion bulk large in this third collection from the PEN/Faulkner Award winner (Fever, 1989; Philadelphia Fire, 1990; etc.).
The method in these ten stories is quickly established in the opener, “Weight,” an ironically affectionate paean to its unnamed narrator’s frail, cancer-ridden mother, whose stoical shouldering of her own and others’ burdens is metaphorically compared to weight-lifting—as is the narrator’s own act of helping carry the coffin. In the similar “Are Dreams Faster Than the Speed of Light,” a man dying of a lingering neurological disease plans the mercy killing of his equally moribund elderly father, a VA hospital patient. But life perversely reasserts itself (“No opportunity, after all, to play God”). The best of the stories are charged with deep feeling, impressive verbal skill, and a salutary fatalism that honors, as it scrutinizes, its characters’ ability to take the blows rained down on them, and to keep on truckin’. And their range is often extraordinary: from a pro basketball player’s mid-game collapse to a rich remembrance of a beloved grandfather’s burial (“Who Weeps When One of Us Goes Down Blues”), or the wrenching tale (“What We Cannot Speak of We Must Pass Over in Silence”) of a middle-aged bachelor’s casual friendship with the father of a lifer imprisoned in Arizona, to whom the narrator brings the news of the death of the prisoner’s father. Wideman stumbles in free-form tales evoking eminent black icons (“Fanon,” “The Silence of Thelonious Monk”). But he achieves a tour de force in the luminous “Sightings,” whose itinerant academic narrator meditates to stunning effect on the suicide of two very different friends and colleagues—and endures the disturbingly monitory experience of “my dead greeting me, testing me, reminding me that there won’t be another time.”
A rich display of the varied skills of one of our finest writers.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-51525-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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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