Written in the years just before his death, 15 stories by Hersey (Antoinetta, 1991, etc.) characterized by the same subtle wisdom about human nature and the same haunting resolutions that mark his best work. ``Get Up Sweet Slug-a-Bed,'' the longest and strongest piece here, concerns the struggle of an independent, charming man to preserve something of his style while dying of AIDS and captures the sad drama of terminal illness. Other stories are little more than sketches, but even these short takes earn their keep: In ``Page Two,'' Hersey writes fake crime reports, notably of a robbery that included among its booty Chinese satin shoes that ``had slender upsweeping forms at the front like swan's necks.'' The perpetrator is spotted walking up a Key West street wearing the shoes: ``Mr. Francis cheerfully confessed the thefts and asked the duty officer whether he had ever seen such beautiful shoes.'' Meanwhile, ``Did You Ever Have Such Sport,'' about John James Audubon shooting staggering numbers of birds just for the ``sport'' of it, hits a darker note—as does ``Just Like Me and You,'' about a funeral organized for a slave child by a tenderhearted Methodist lady. The tale ends with a powerful image of Western cultural ignorance, yet Hersey softens the blow by acknowledging the good intentions of the misguided woman. Other standouts include the ruefully comic ``The Two Lives of Consuela Castanon,'' about the brief fling of an obese young woman, and ``Fantas Fest,'' which captures the ambivalent mix of excitement and fear, love and bemusement, that fills a woman who's about to meet the grown child she gave up for adoption. At his finest, Hersey creates characters and situations that linger in the mind like real memories. A bittersweet, resonant ending, then, to an extraordinary career.
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-42992-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
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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