An uneven but entertaining collection from a strong new voice.
A varied assortment of characters populate the stories in Hendrickson’s debut collection.
These 13 tales run the gamut from sci-fi and crime fiction to more mainstream musings about relationships and growing up, and each has a unique narrative voice. Writing in a naturalistic style, Hendrickson imitates the way real people speak, down to stammers and accents. When characters say things such as, “Whattayagonnado,” or “Ohhww, lookit chew,” their voices come through loud and clear. These are less literary tales than they are yarns that one might overhear in a bar; indeed, one of them, “The B-Plus Factor,” seems like exactly that. The strongest stories depict life in small-town Middle America, usually its underbelly. “There are some places here in the rural Midwest that don’t really exist,” opens the final story, “The Sovereign,” one of the most memorable in the collection. These darkly funny tales are about people such as bartenders, survivalists, and drug dealers who live in trailers and farms in the middle of nowhere—people whom the system conspires against. The opening story, “It’s Legal, There,” sets the stage, illustrating the contortions of the legal system as a woman is tried for the murder of her young son. “Three Pines” is an extended joke about three drunk teens who get revenge of a sort on the unlikable cop in their tiny Michigan town. Some stories are so slight as to be little more than vignettes, such as “I Know You Do,” about a lawyer moonlighting at an airport as a luggage handler. Other tales seem to be auditioning as the first chapter of a novel. “It’s Easy As,” a sci-fi story tale set in a highly stratified future society, introduces a lawyer and his client, who is accused of “thought-crime,” but will leave readers wanting more. Even though the selected stories wander through many genres and themes, Hendrickson displays a confidence that promises more exciting things to come.
An uneven but entertaining collection from a strong new voice.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5150-3823-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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