Keeble does well with the land, less well with people.
Eight stories and one novella, linked more by place than theme.
The place is farming country outside Spokane, Wash., profiled in “The Fishers.” These small farmers are good neighbors, averse to gossip, resistant to change. Ed Erickson was typical, living through his kids, pained they wouldn’t want to succeed him. All this his widow Louise sees clearly. It’s an elegiac piece, not bad, but it lacks focus, like most of Keeble’s work, rambling off into a meditation on the struggle between fishers and porcupines. In “The Transmission,” Pete helps his Indian neighbor Louis, a trucker, with a balky thousand-pound transmission. The maneuvering distracts attention from the main event, the decision by Louis’s wife Bird to leave him and the wedge this drives between Louis and Pete. Louis pops up again in the best story, “I Could Love You (If I Wanted).” Here, Lola, a single parent, is caring for her dying mother while reluctantly fending off Louis, the consummate ladies’ man. Keeble keeps the focus on Lola’s ambivalence, and it pays off. Another recurring character is Jim Blood. We see him as a child in Saskatchewan in “Chickens,” then as a novice farmer in Washington in “The Chasm,” finally as an established landowner in the novella “Freeing the Apes,” which promises to be meaty; Jim’s neighbor, a female air force colonel, has been found dead. Foul play is suspected. But once again, we are distracted, this time by narrator Peter’s marital and other problems. It is also problematic that the violent climax, long building, occurs just offstage. In the title story, Fay Harper, a middle-aged widow with grown children, is heading to Alaska to scatter her husband’s ashes. She’s quit her job as a hospital nutritionist to work as a cook on an oil tanker—a decision Keeble describes merely as “driven by powerful obscurities.”
Keeble does well with the land, less well with people.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2006
ISBN: 0-8032-2777-9
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
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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