Our most industrious writer back at the anvil, making her usual unholy racket, while simultaneously throwing off sporadic...
Oates (The Gravedigger’s Daughter, 2007, etc.) channels her energies into fictionalizations of the last days of five major American writers.
“Poe Posthumous; or, The Light-House” is the “spoken” diary kept by Poe while he tends a lighthouse on a Southern Pacific island (after he has died). It’s also a frisky homage to H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, as it subjects the neurasthenic Baltimorean to agonizing memories of love and loss, and his own transformation into a hybrid monster akin to the “Cyclophagus” created by his deranged imagination. “Poe” is considerably better than Oates’s creepy, overwritten portrayals of an enfeebled Mark Twain, obsessed with nubile girls (“Grandpa Clemens & Angelfish 1906”), and of Ernest Hemingway contemplating suicide (“Papa at Ketchum 1961”). The latter’s handful of moving moments are unfortunately dwarfed by a turgid recycling of a half century’s worth of Hemingway-related clichés. Far superior, and successful in utterly different ways, are her subtly imagined treatments of the not-altogether-dissimilar figures of Emily Dickinson and Henry James. “The Master at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital 1914-1916” presents the elderly James as a civilian volunteer caring for World War I wounded, who quickly become the “dear boys” he has always secretly desired. This is as generous and admiring a view of James as was offered in Colm Tóibín’s superb novel The Master (2004), and Oates caps it with a plaintive, dreamlike description of his death as this inveterate traveler’s ultimate journey. Best is “EDickinsonRepliLuxe,” a Frankenstein-like fantasy in which a mousy culture vulture and her frosty husband purchase a computer-powered replicant of the poetess, then are themselves transformed by “Emily’s” surprisingly strong—and human—will.
Our most industrious writer back at the anvil, making her usual unholy racket, while simultaneously throwing off sporadic sparks of unalloyed brilliance.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-143479-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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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