Further tales from American horse culture by Maristed, whose last novel, Fall (1996), offered more than one ever wanted to know about show jumping. These nine stories, in her first collection, are broader in focus but still suffer from an excess of uniformity in theme. Horses, horses everywhere notwithstanding, one of these tales is an unqualified chiller, stark and brutal in its revelations: “Blue Horse” is told by a young woman, now a homeless prostitute, who was abducted as a girl by a bodybuilder, tied up and abused in every way possible, then dragged back and forth across the country in a nightmare that lasted for years. Only when she began to act more like a lover and less like a victim did her abuser shun her, eventually freeing her by shooting himself—but the damage to her is permanent, and she’s convinced she can never go home again. A more conventional, less unsettling image of a broken home appears in —Rain—: a workaholic whose daughter wants a pony for her birthday can—t bear to tell his wife he’s been booted from his Boston law firm, and so he trades one addiction for another until his family leaves him. Two other stories explore family matters, along with the pressures of breeding and showing horses: in —Barn Swallows,— a brother-sister team with a respectable name in the business are well on their way to triumph at a show, which would quash recent memories of family tragedy—when further tragedy strikes. And in —If Wishes Were Horses, My Love,— a trackside wheeler-dealer, having lost his family and the wealthy woman he took up with, invests all his hopes for a reversal of his fortunes in just a colt—only to have the horse come up lame at an unfortunate moment. Some pieces here are more successful than others, yet all show the coiled emotional power and the unexpected detail typical of Maristed’s particular but also considerable talent.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-44410-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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
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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