Quite interesting for sociological reasons, and for impressions of these many locations, but ultimately the collection...
A hodge-podge of short fiction by young English writers, gathered “from every corner of the country” to show what Bell and Gay call “a picture of England at the beginning of the twenty-first century.”
The editors rightly point to contemporary English fiction’s London bias; it seems that “a novel set in, say, Bradford or Exeter is seen as necessarily provincial and limited.” Their remedy is to provide 24 stories that vividly evoke their settings—from Suffolk to York, Bradford to Brighton, Coventry to Cornwall. But the collection’s diversity is strictly regional; the characters and the subject matter are so similar that the pieces can blur into each other. In David Almond’s “Bleeding Statues,” daft South Shields women get enthused about a Jesus statue that they think is moving, while the detached young narrator knows better. In Joolz Denby’s “The Quick and the Dead 2,” a group of women discuss a murder while a detached young narrator eavesdrops. In Peter Ho Davies’s “Coventry,” a heavy-drinking working-class man gets befriended by an educated but—yes—detached young narrator. The authors’ extreme youth (a glance at the contributors’ list yields birth dates as recent as 1977) may be the cause of such uniformity; it is almost certainly the cause of many of the stories’ contrived use of phonetically rendered dialogue. The clunkiness of a phrase like “Zee ahl right yu reckon?” (in Harland Miller’s “Castle Early”) reveals an almost embarrassing eagerness to be influenced by Irvine Welsh. Yet there's a solid handful of standouts here, including Davies’s aforementioned “Coventry”; Kevin Sampson’s “Black Diamond,” narrated by a foggy-headed Birkendhead barfly; and Julie Burchill’s “By the Sea We Flourish,” depicting a misguided trip to Brighton.
Quite interesting for sociological reasons, and for impressions of these many locations, but ultimately the collection inadvertently paints small-city England as an unvaried and rather grim place.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-575-07127-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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