If Candace Bushnell had settled in Park Slope or Ann Arbor instead of Manhattan, Stapleton might have got herself a plagiarism suit. But as things turned out, this debut collection about young women trying to strike off on their own won its author the 1998 Columbia Journal fiction prize instead. Workshop prose can have a stultifying effect on the writer as well as the reader, and all the pieces here display that obsessive attention to voice at the expense of plot that one can only pick up in a classroom. To begin with, nearly every piece is a portrait rather than a story. The title one, for example, describes in pointlessly ominous detail a girl’s decision to defy her family and go out on a date with a neighborhood tough. The resolution (the girl becomes pregnant and dies) is only hinted at, and in a way that adds more confusion than depth overall. Similarly, “The Middle of October” tells of an unpleasant first date—one that goes sour when the boy’s mentally disturbed twin sister wanders in. The waitress of “The Great Artist,” who has recently settled in New York, dates a succession of bad men, while the child-care worker of “No Such Absolute” finds herself equally unable to connect (“Ana felt everyone was right when they said there are two kinds of men in the world”). The longest piece is “Pure Impending Glory,” which describes the slow coming of age of a woman from a poor family who goes to good schools, studies hard, and eventually becomes a college professor. Journeyman work of considerable talent but no originality whatsoever. If Stapleton can find a way of matching her imagination to her prose, she—ll have a good future ahead of her. But there’s no sign of that here.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-879960-54-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
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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