Uneven overall—but its best stories reaffirm that Novakovich is one of the great American writers of recent emergence.
The Croatian-American author’s third collection offers 11 darkly comic stories about “Yugoslavia. Wars. Emigrants. Disappearing places.”
Those subjects are enumerated in “59th Parallel,” one of three stories focused on Balkan immigrants in America. Its narrator is displaced in numerous ways—as he rides the New York subway in the wake of the World Trade Center catastrophe, converses with an attractive redhead and, when nothing further develops, relates his experience and observes that “after 9/11, it’s nice not to have a plot, or big events.” A similar willed flatness limits the effectiveness of the story of a solitary immigrant college professor’s encounter with a straying wife and her suspicious husband (“Night Guests”); and the account of a Slovenian-American writer’s family trip to Russia, and frustratingly romantic night at the Bolshoi Ballet (“Tchaikovsky’s Bust”). But when Novakovich returns to the Balkans, he’s in his element. “The Stamp” wryly fictionalizes the assassination of the archduke Ferdinand, which precipitated WWI. The murderous legacy of Slobodan Milosevic takes numerous ingeniously seriocomic forms: the sexual dysfunction experienced during a “half-Serb, half-Croat” immigrant woman’s misconceived dalliance with a fast-talking countryman (“Spleen”); a Serbian grocer’s indecision whether to emigrate with his family, as bombs keep falling (“Neighbors”); and a Bosnian soldier’s accusation of betrayal when he attempts to follow newly adopted Buddhist principles (“Hail”). Civilian and pacifist protagonists suffer increasing privations and indignities in two longer, more ambitious stories (“Ribs”; “The Bridge Under the Danube”). And in two masterpieces, Novakovich traces the descent into war fervor of a thoughtful schoolboy who loves the exhilaration of winter and fears global warming (“Snow Powder”); and the roiling emotions of a cardiac patient who forms a strange relationship with his potential donor, then finds an unconventional path to renewed vitality (“A Purple Story”).
Uneven overall—but its best stories reaffirm that Novakovich is one of the great American writers of recent emergence.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-058399-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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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