Undistinguished work, for the most part. But “Retribution” and “Liars” offer hopeful glimpses of the heights Fulton may be...
A mixed-bag debut collection of ten stories and a novella, mostly concerned with midlife and identity crises, divorce, alcoholism, parental neglect, and adolescent forbearance and rebellion in fragmented Middle American households.
Many of these pieces are frustratingly slight, including “Rose” (an elderly widow’s memories of her timorous husband), “Iceland” (an American woman’s impulsive and pointless sexual adventure in Italy), and “First Sex” (an Eagle Scout math prodigy loses both his innocence and his convictions about his own decency and worth). Ex-spouses in flight from their responsibilities are contrasted with the infinitely more sentient children whom they keep disappointing (“The Troubled Dog,” “Stealing”); others exhibit deceit or incompetence that variously afflict innocent people (a young girl temporarily stricken with “white blindness” in “Visions”; a teenager who finds escape from his mother’s frailties in the “new, bad habits” that come all too easily to him in “Outlaws”). Three stories rise above the general level of mediocrity. “Braces” marshalls an abundance of skillfully selected detail in portraying a subdued 15-year-old “caught in the middle” of his father’s whiny futility and his mother’s recklessness. The novella “Retribution” slowly builds up a frighteningly convincing characterization of teenaged Rachel, whose gentle mother is slowly dying of cancer. Fulton deftly dramatizes the manner in which the presence of impending death—and the need to cheat it—breed in the confused girl an irrational “meanness” that strikes out violently, then, as suddenly and as cryptically, simply disappears. Best of all is “Liars,” about a teenager’s skiing trip with his divorced father and the latter’s smug girlfriend. It’s a moving story filled with surprising developments, in which the metaphor of downhill skiing beautifully suggests the core of carelessness and daring that the boy perceives in his father, cannot comprehend, yet blindly, inexplicably emulates.
Undistinguished work, for the most part. But “Retribution” and “Liars” offer hopeful glimpses of the heights Fulton may be capable of scaling.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-27680-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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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