An expansive, ambitious collection of stories that boldly shows Americans at their best and worst.
Coker’s (School Daze, 2013) collection of stories meditates on America’s history and the men and women who make the country so diverse.
From West Texas to Times Square, the fictional stories travel the United States and span generations to provide a look at the passions and conflicts a variety of Americans have experienced over the years. In one story, Coker writes of a complicated Mafia gangster looking for some semblance of love and sexual satisfaction. In another, an impoverished farmer embarks on a difficult quest to bring a wheelchair to his disabled son. And in the collection’s longest, most substantial story, “Earning an Education,” a young girl in the 1950s struggles to make sense of a world that is becoming increasingly complicated the older she gets. Coker deftly follows an impressive range of storylines, exploring the challenges and aspirations that make her characters’ lives unique and compelling. The characters frequently have a strong attachment to place, and it is the geography and history of the land, especially since the Great Depression, that tend to inform their personalities by limiting their worldview or encouraging them to find new vistas. Additionally, strong family ties join the characters, with sons and daughters deeply connected to their grandparents or mourning the loss of their children. The collection is by turns sentimental, shining a warm light on the memories of youth, and also dark and emotionally complicated. In one story, a woman unable to recover from the loss of her infant finds herself disconnecting from life and her husband: “Her babies were cold and dead in the ground; she was cold and dead above the ground.” Though many scenes are fit for Norman Rockwell, Coker doesn’t hide characters from violence or turmoil. In this sense, “Earning an Education” is perhaps too ambitious, as it attempts to balance segregation, lechery, gender politics and adolescent love in one story—enough material there for a stand-alone novel. Should Coker return to that story, it’s clear she’ll tell it with sincerity, courage and a passion for details.
An expansive, ambitious collection of stories that boldly shows Americans at their best and worst.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-1478211730
Page Count: 188
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2013
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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