Hecht shows herself to be a master of both shrewd observation and wistful longing.
Witty and understated stories chronicling intimate realities of everyday life.
Hecht (The Unprofessionals, 2003) uses an unnamed first-person narrator to give continuity to the stories, most of which are set in Nantucket. Although there are occasional allusions to a husband and siblings, the narrator concentrates almost exclusively on the seemingly inconsequential but sprightly details of her personal life. We know, for example, that she is a fierce vegan who disapproves of the sous chef of the local café throwing, as she describes it, animal parts onto a grill. In addition, she has a swooning admiration for Paul McCartney and admits she’s looking for someone just like him—“a vegetarian, musician, animalrights [sic] activist, and garden lover who [lives] in the countryside of [a] civilized country.” It’s clear that she does not think of America as all that civilized, as allusions to the “Alfred E. Neuman” president and his penchant for saying “nucular” make clear. (“Will this never be corrected or brought to the attention of the world?” she wonders.) It’s hard to pick a favorite here, for all the stories are both stark and guileful. In “Being and Nothingness” we meet her psychiatrist, never much help because “he remained a shy, stammering, befuddled person”—though she also cunningly speculates that this might be “just an act he used to control people and get whatever he wanted.” The titular story is a tour de force in which a charming but inept interviewer has extended phone conversations with the narrator, revealing far more about himself than he should.
Hecht shows herself to be a master of both shrewd observation and wistful longing.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6425-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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