A mixed batch from a superior craftsman.
Life is a minefield for the unsuspecting protagonists of nine wide-ranging tales.
Take the Moura family, in the title story, set in Portugal during the Salazar dictatorship. Working-class folk, the Mouras have a small summer cottage on the estate of the Carvalhos, wealthy vineyard owners. After Carvalho prompts him to express his disgust for the tyrant, Moura gets a visit from the secret police. Fortunately, the regime is crumbling, and Gardiner describes a curious trajectory: The flight of the Carvalhos, the occupation of the mansion by the Mouras, and their eviction by their own daughter, married in secret to the Carvalho heir. Another trap is sprung in “Leaving Port McHair.” In 1967, in Washington, that “city of deception and stagecraft,” Paul, one of a small riverbank community of left-wing activists, is set up by an informer, while across the river in Virginia, retired widower Walter Paige is fighting a trumped-up lawsuit alleging child abuse 30 years before (“The Shape of the Past”). Young English schoolboy Tony Hoskins, crossing the dangerous Atlantic in 1941 to reach safe harbor in Canada (“The Voyage Out”), has to deal with his cabinmate’s attempts at sodomy; when his persecutor disappears overboard, Tony has a long struggle to affirm his innocence. Old Father Anthonie, a village priest in the Pyrenees seeking to protect his flock, is tripped up by the snares of the computer age (“The Doll House”). In his third collection (after The Incubator Ballroom, 1991), novelist Gardiner moves easily among the decades and the continents, though unfortunately there’s excess overlap between “Fugitive Color” (an art school in Provence) and “The Head of Farnham Hall” (a Pennsylvania girls’ school). Both involve anonymous death threats, a problem student, and an institutional reputation hanging in the balance. Gardiner is a busy writer, his controlling sensibility always in evidence, sometimes stifling his characters’ autonomy. Whether it’s Portuguese adversaries or radicals on the Potomac, they know their places in the well-choreographed dance.
A mixed batch from a superior craftsman.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58243-233-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
SEEN & HEARD
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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