Mature, literate work.
Oy. Even if there’s no one named Portnoy here, Clayton’s well-crafted stories abound in existential complaints large and small.
You don’t have to be Jewish to appreciate Clayton (Writing/Univ. of Massachusetts), but it might help in catching nuances. Clayton takes pains to distinguish universalism, the erasure of tribal differences, from universality, global acceptance of a tribal work, but still, he writes, “I hope for Jewish and non-Jewish readers; but I speak as a Jew.” Some of the later stories collected here have the Jobian sense of accumulated testing: in the author’s case, by the death of a son; in his characters’ cases, by the usual pains of life, of marriages gone dull or dead, of children who distance themselves and memories that flee, all of which can be responded to only by “the Jewish mudra of acquiescence: lower lip out, shoulders up to ear, neck retrenched turtle-like, hands open.” Some of Clayton’s stories, most of them early ones—dating, that is, to the ’70s and ’80s—are a bit lighter of touch, marked by genial squabbling, “postmortems on lovemaking” and furtive tokes on inexpertly rolled joints. A high point in this already strong gathering is the mid-career story “The Man Who Could See Radiance,” with hints of magical realism butting up on Kafkaesque gloom, its protagonist a man who “saved his heart in a safe deposit vault and brought out small sums when he could.” More pointedly up on the headlines, “The Builder” finds the generations worrying over fine distinctions: When a veteran wrestler-with-God offers the observation that the great Mao-induced famine in China in the early ’60s adds up to five holocausts, his interlocutor protests that there’s no comparison—but agrees that cognitive dissonance is really “dissonance of the heart, and how do you live with that?”
Mature, literate work.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59264-202-1
Page Count: 620
Publisher: Toby Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
