Brimming with characters and moments that give the reader a reason to ponder, lying behind every laugh and eccentricity.
A debut collection of 12 stories centers on humans, animals, and talking appliances as they endure loss and betrayal, all with a firm grasp on hope.
The opening tale, “The Sea Otter and the Terraformed Planet,” sets the book’s tone, a zaniness ultimately offset by a sobering message. The titular mammal, who regularly converses with the planet, is the world’s only conscious being. Unhappy with basic amenities the planet provides, the Sea Otter demands more, including a “smart phone” (he’s not sure what it is, just that he wants one). But when he has to share the planet with other sea otters, he’ll grow to resent them for what they have. Later tales follow suit. “A Proposed Game of House Risk” features a hilarious update on the strategy board game Risk, but one that turns frighteningly serious once a sledgehammer enters the picture. Similarly, a 9-year-old girl in “To the Moon, Iris” searches for seven butterflies to help her escape to the moon; it’s an endearing take on a child’s imagination (though it could be real), but Iris is fleeing her physically and verbally abusive father. So many of the book’s characters are tortured in some way, like Tom of “Into Baratova” losing his father, or Sam in “The Silent Drive,” whose frequent hospital visits courtesy of Danny aren’t even the reason he hates his older brother—there’s something much worse. Optimism, however, often finds a place within Hatch’s stories. In “The Best Visitor,” Bradley’s best friends are his kitchen appliances, but the toaster may convince him to interact with another human. And Francis Price, in “My Father, the Hero,” tells of dad Arthur, who, living in his car, became truly heroic when he one day stepped outside of his 1962 Ford Cortina to stop a “Super Villain.” Every story, to a certain extent, is driven by what seems otherworldly or characters’ outrageous behavior, like an investment firm CEO who literally won’t stop swimming (“The Constant Swimmer”). But as the title implies, there’s an authenticity throughout, a book that makes the extraordinary both plausible and believable.
Brimming with characters and moments that give the reader a reason to ponder, lying behind every laugh and eccentricity.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5300-5961-4
Page Count: 220
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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