A promising first collection, showcasing a new writer’s significant powers of invention—though he seems merely to be tuning...
The sky is falling, the world is ending, and Rumpelstiltskin is going to pieces in this intriguing but unfulfilling debut collection.
Arkansas-based Brockmeier won a 2000 O. Henry Award for the opening story, “These Hands,” about a 34-year-old male babysitter who grows ever more obsessed with the 18-month-old girl in his charge. The other ten tales have similarly quirky approaches, focusing on unusual living conditions or supernatural states of being. In “The Ceiling,” for example, a man has to cope with his wife’s new affair and the fact that the sky is slowly descending toward the earth. The narrator of “The Passenger” was born and raised, and now lives, in a never-landing airplane. “A Day in the Life of Half of Rumpelstiltskin” portrays half of the well-known villain—literally one half of his body—living out a quiet life in contemporary America, eating lunch in parks and working at a department store. Brockmeier’s habitual strategy is to concoct a weird condition and then explore it in detail, but only in a few instances do we get the rise and fall of action—as in “Apples,” about a man who experiences his first kiss and sees his teacher killed by a flying bucket on the same school day; or the title story, about a middle-aged librarian who finds redemption in an eccentric old patron. Brockmeier’s scenarios are entertaining, even if reading them occasionally feels like eating at a themed restaurant—nice decorations, but predictable once you get the idea. He has a tendency to overdescribe (“A smile evanesced across her face,” “the sky grew bright with afternoon,” etc.), but in moments of high effect he puts on quite a brilliant show. The conversation between half of Rumpelstiltskin and the women at a local auxiliary club is an outstanding piece of comedy.
A promising first collection, showcasing a new writer’s significant powers of invention—though he seems merely to be tuning his instrument for future work.Pub Date: March 26, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-42134-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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