Work from a master of short fiction.
A weighty collection brings together artists and writers, along with their analysts and miseries.
Those who know Baumbach (B, 2002, etc.) are familiar with his universe, one where marriages are temporary while anxiety, miscommunication and half-siblings are forever. The title story is the opener here, a freight train of a tale in which the protagonist’s father spills his guts in an unwitting mea culpa. This dead father was a womanizing artist who conducted affairs throughout his life because “these women were the lubricating fluid that made my motor run as an artist.” The artist’s name is Hudson. Are we intended to notice that the cover illustration, a bold painting much like those described in the story, is by one Harold Baumbach? In fact, Baumbach’s entire collection, with its many references to the difficulties of the creative life and the confusions of human interaction, seems like a roman à clef, although what the key unlocks is less clear. It might be either Baumbach’s personal story, or the entirety of the modern human urban condition. In “Past Perfect,” our hero has an affair with a woman he’d fallen for 30 years earlier. In “Window in the Woods,” a college-age son attempts to seduce a classmate in his film studies class by means of his (the student’s) father’s avant-garde film work. And in “Bright is Innocent: Scenes from an Imaginary Movie,” we follow a bewildered protagonist as he’s thrown as the unwitting hero into a James Bondesque thriller. Baumbach also includes stories from his earlier collections Babble (1976: surreal stories of a strangely mature baby’s precocious adventures), The Return of Service (1979: the protagonist’s father as both opponent and umpire), and The Life and Times of Major Fiction (1987: about dissolving marriages and creativity).
Work from a master of short fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-9723363-3-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Low Fidelity Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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