paper 1-889330-35-3 A debut collection of 13 stories by academic Slater (Univ. of Nebraska/English), whose efforts won her the 1998 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Slater has a light touch, which lends a grace to her work that’s as welcome (in its lack of pretense) as it is rare. The standard contemporary themes—domestic and social life—predominate, but Slater’s characters have a sense of humor and enough of a sharp ironic edge to keep them from sinking into the quicksand of self-absorption. The title piece, for example, is an interior monologue of a new mother who tries, as all new mothers do, to envision the life of the baby whose future has suddenly eclipsed her own. Nuanced and extremely subtle, it makes good use of the classic pattern of parental affections played against actual reality, as does “Pretty Night,” which portrays a middle-aged father’s sympathetic pain in the face of his daughter’s social unease at a school dance. Other pieces have a decidedly fantastic edge to them: “Our New Life” offers an amusingly literal take on the process of transference that occurs between a psychologist and her patient, while “Soft Money” shows the effect of environment upon attitude through the adventures of an a man who redecorates his office and actually creates a new world. “The Things We Find” depicts two unhappy teenage baby-sitters who rummage through the homes of their clients looking for evidence that all domestic life is as flawed as their own, while “Sandra Dee Ate Here” is about a young waitress trying to start over again after the collapse of her marriage. The restraint with which Slater handles her characters” overwhelming melancholy is remarkable. It is exactly this understatement that makes her fiction so poignant and striking. Memorable and rich: Slater brings an extraordinary precision to the delineation of everyday sorrows and the indomitable hopes they generate.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-889330-34-5
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
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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