Stories quietly celebrating the insights that middle-aged women, born too early for today's big careers, salvage from the wreckage of their lives. By the author of Is This What Other Women Feel Too? (1991), etc. Seese's women, usually in their late 40s or early 50s, went to college but learned nothing that prepared them for the rest of their lives. ``I am a receptionist,'' announces the narrator of the title novella. ``Another girl who paid the price of reading what I wanted for four years.'' The women also tend to be Catholic, were raised in blue-collar neighborhoods, and left home as soon as they could. The novella's narrator recalls a past that has led to a life of constant travel and many disappointments, assuaged only by watching reruns of James Mason movies. She recalls a botched abortion; a love affair with an Irish student; a friend who murdered her cold and unloving mother; a recent winter in Dublin when she had an affair with a priest and worked for an American homosexual. In notable pieces like ``the Polish Girl and the Black Musician,'' ``Hildegarde's Long Gloves,'' and ``Ashtrays,'' respectively, a young Polish-American artist from Detroit marries a black musician from St. Louis so that she ``can leave this factory town,'' although her courage is only a mask for desperation; a middle-aged woman tells her childhood friend that ``life is not a fashion statement,'' and then recalls the white gloves she stole as a child because she wanted to be like Hildegarde, ``who wore white gloves and sang in a voice that made [her] shiver''; and a divorced woman (``forty, not long separated and smoking so much'') leaves San Francisco for North Carolina, though she's still in love with her homosexual husband. Slender stories that resonate with wisdom and a wry understanding of the familiar angst of middle age for lonely women.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1994
ISBN: 1-56478-040-6
Page Count: 121
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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