Exotic without being voyeuristic, Armstrong’s stories provide an unusual perspective into a distant and beleaguered world.
Debut collection of eight stories, all set in the South Seas.
Geography is everything here, so much so that the islands of Fiji, Tahiti, and Tongo shape and define these tales far more than the characters who inhabit them. The author, who has evidently spent a good deal of time in these parts, depicts a world at once enchanted and decrepit, perched about as far from the center of civilization as it’s possible to get but doomed nevertheless to be invaded and tamed by tourism and trade. The Westerners who venture into Polynesia in Armstrong’s telling seem infallibly lost: In “Night Watch,” for example, the expatriate charter-boat skippers and their crews are deracinated and ridiculous—as out of place and ultimately helpless as the young slackers of “Inside Passage,” who sail haplessly to Tahiti in a kind of waterborne episode of Beavis and Butthead. The natives, on the surface, are more at home, but they’re gradually losing their own world. The young Tongan boy of “Hunger Pass,” for example, becomes a Mormon so as to receive an education in the US and returns home—fatally—as a missionary. The widowed Fijian mother of “Cane Field” is driven by poverty to offer her daughter to a lecherous Australian who promises marriage to half the girls in the village, while the Pohnpeian carver of “Drowning in Air” is asked to deface one of his masterpieces by tourists who want to use it as a cribbage board. Armstrong’s tone is even and cool, and he manages to drive his point home without belaboring it. The best of the lot is “Woman of his Choice,” about a young islander who leaves his village to work in a resort and finds it hard to come home again.
Exotic without being voyeuristic, Armstrong’s stories provide an unusual perspective into a distant and beleaguered world.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-15-601349-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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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