A second collection of stories, mostly set among the Catholics of Northern Ireland, by the Irish author of 1996’s Booing the Bishop (not reviewed). If things move along at the present rate, and Belfast succeeds in mutating from a political to a literary hot spot, Collins will probably be regarded as a single eminence in a worthy company. Which would be something of a shame, since he is worth attending to on his own. The characters in Collins’s stories are all recognizably Irish in both their origins and concerns, but—lacking the sentimental resentments of the brothers McCourt—they—ll appeal to more subtle tastes. Sickness and injury are the dominant motifs: “The Lump” tells of an infected wound, while the aptly entitled “Shame and Pain” describes a middle-aged husband’s humiliating efforts to keep his hemorrhoid surgeries secret from his wife, only to be presented by her with a far more momentous surprise in the end. The rapid collapse of domestic life becomes a metaphor of modern social decay in “Breaking the News,” about an elderly widower’s physical and emotional decline. “Unwinding in France” is a seriocomic account of a Winnebago holiday that nearly breaks up a family. The best piece, however, is the title story, about a divorced husband’s attempt to keep his daughter’s affection in the face of his ex-wife’s hatred—and the crisis that ensues when he is frustrated. Understated and strikingly narrated (“Not even a woman could get inside your body the way booze could”), it sets the pattern of quiet melancholy that the other tales elaborate on. Refreshing and unique: Collins provides a new take on familiar territory.
Pub Date: Nov. 2, 1998
ISBN: 0-85640-622-8
Page Count: 140
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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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