Bennett’s sometimes unpolished but ravishing language, with his ability to animate lives within a landscape that dwarfs the...
Twelve raw and vivid loosely linked stories set in and around Sydney.
The title story is the unsettling tale of an inarticulate man whose wife is divorcing him and taking their five-year-old son. When Mavis Cranshaw hires the man to restore the verandah at Forby’s Rest, he’s unable to focus on the job, his desperation grows, he drinks too much, and self-destruction takes a ferocious turn. In “Groping Head,” Mavis’s nephew recalls, on the last day of her life, spending boyhood summers with her at the beach after his father died. He ponders a painting by his grandfather, a landscape artist, that shows his grandmother and his aunt Mavis as a child at the seaside. It’s the only known Southworth painting that depicts people, and it comes to shimmer with immortality. The sketchier “Inside an Ink Cloud” gives a memorable account of a shark attack on a young surfer, while “Landmarks” details a man’s recurring nightmare of the real tragedy of a young girl who drowned when her hair got caught in the filter of a pool. A bride-to-be is shopping for shoes in “Out Walking” when, outside, a body falls from the sky, “accompanied by a spray of glass shards and a single, baritone scream.” Her older friend Devlin is so unmoored he believes she should call off the wedding. He goes for a walk, gets lost, and meets his doom. “Light Sweet Crude” and “Alaska” both involve Jack, a blue-eyed blond who surfed for fun and fixed cars for a living. In the first story, she’s 22 and her affair with Riley, an older married man, leads to pregnancy and an escape from Australia to Alaska. The second story, from the point of view of her adoring younger sister 20 years later, details her last days before heading to Alaska.
Bennett’s sometimes unpolished but ravishing language, with his ability to animate lives within a landscape that dwarfs the human, makes for a memorable debut.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-55192-649-0
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Raincoast
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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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