A mixed bag of experimental writing and rural fables mostly aimed at readers who frequent the high-end literary journals on...
A dozen stories that mash up poetic, dreamlike observations with the caustic, inbred hardiness of New Englanders.
Harmon (Quinnehtukqut, 2007, etc.) writes stories that feel rooted in his poetry background, and many read more like dream diaries than traditional narratives. For the most part, they focus on the perils of youth and the indignities of old age. In the opener, “Rope,” two sisters imagine that their brother has run away to the woods, where he keeps a girl tied to a tree with a rope he stole from a neighbor. “The Burning House” is representative of the prose style at work: “I am no longer sure of memory, of the flashes I see and also of the gaps where I know things are missing; if what I recall is recalled for any reason beyond the telling,” Harmon writes. Some, like the title story and its follow-up, “Hattie Dalton,” are sketches lasting only a few pages. Others, like “The Lighthouse Keeper”—a story told in abstract definitions of places and characters in a small town—or “Dear Oklahoma,” an ode to home, are linguistically experimental but not all that interesting. That said, the collection has a breakout story or two, such as the lengthy confession of a fisherman living in exile, “The Fisherman and His Wife.” The book also improves when Harmon takes a more straightforward approach. This is especially true in the collection’s showpiece, “The Passion of Asa Fitch,” a spectacular portrait of a cantankerous old SOB burdened with the remainder of his wits and a flirtatious spirit that refuses to go gracefully into the night.
A mixed bag of experimental writing and rural fables mostly aimed at readers who frequent the high-end literary journals on a regular basis.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-936873-43-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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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