This delightful collection of short fiction sketches Southern life of the past.
Writer and Episcopal priest Elberfeld offers this short but charming collection of quintessential Southern short stories (The Lady of the House, 2013).
Elberfeld’s eight short stories—set primarily in Georgia in the indefinite past (most likely early to mid-20th century)—differ in themes but share a distinct Dixie flavor. Most feature a dominant woman or, in the case of the first story, “Brotherly Love,” a domineering woman. The men are altogether absent or, if physically present, psychologically or otherwise troubled. “Cicadas” and the title entry focus on unhappy married women—throwbacks to another generation when wives stayed home—feeling helpless in their difficult relationships. In both cases, the women eventually abandon their marriages but in very different ways. Both “It’s a Blessing” and “The Boardinghouse Reach” include male characters whose lives are irrevocably impacted—and cut short—by accidents of birth. The devoted mothers who bore and subsequently mourn them elicit tremendous emotion. Bobby Lee, the funeral singer in “Ten Bucks,” is the lone male protagonist in the collection, but he, a disembodied vocalist who fantasizes about how he will spend his earnings while mourners suffer on the other side of a curtain, doesn’t emerge as a sympathetic character. Similarly, “Ten Bucks” is also the only story that emphasizes friendship over family. Despite the differences among stories, they are united by a memorable voice, unique and engaging while reminiscent of other great voices of Southern literature. Aside from the significant fact that the stories take place in the rural or small-town South, animating place details aren’t developed.
This delightful collection of short fiction sketches Southern life of the past.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-56474-572-9
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Daniel & Daniel Publishers
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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