The random adventures of life stitched together and explained with unconventional devices—that both do and don’t work.
Thirteen loosely connected stories of rural Canada less about sex and death than about everything else.
The Manitoba-born Patterson (a memoir, The Water In Between, 2000) often delivers miniature essays amid his stories on subjects as far-ranging as emperor penguins and the utilitarian aesthetics of rope, while a consistent theme is the emotional cabin fever that’s as much a result of the landscape of the title as it is of a standard and familiar domesticity. The people here are as likely to reach out to others as they are to turn on one another. “Gabriella: Parts One and Two” is about an ex-soldier who finds himself sharing an apartment with two Spanish women—in a story that aspires to realism by going nowhere. “Saw Marks” is the frailest of plot adumbrations hung on a piece of seemingly straight nonfiction about man’s prehistory in the Serengeti. In “The Perseid Shower,” a boy’s generalized disappointment with his father finds its focus in dad’s preoccupation with incinerator drums, model airplanes, and the yearly meteor shower. And “Insomnia, Infidelity, and the Leopard Seal” is a lesson on mood disorders as manifested in a character’s sleep deprivation—and before it cures our insomnia we’re sure to find out what happens to those emperor penguins. Patterson’s attempt to tie his pieces together by ending each with “This was in 1980” or “This was in 2004,” etc., gives a feeling that each story amounts to a kind of journal entry: the connected-story premise disconnects, and one wishes that Patterson’s talent for disparate narrative voices were hung on a strategy less flimsy. Still, sometimes the static voice of essay comes to stand perfectly for these people and this place: “A static structure bears perpendicular surfaces well. The column reliably supports loads only when vertical and straight; when gravity is the only antagonist, flat continuous planes at right angles to one another . . . .”
The random adventures of life stitched together and explained with unconventional devices—that both do and don’t work.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50627-9
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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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