Nine stories by a San Francisco writer, most depicting the sadnesses of domestic life. The characters we meet here, as in so many debut collections, are mostly children who don—t know how to begin something or grownups who wish they had never started. The title piece, for example, is a recollection of childhood set in1969, contrasting a little girl’s TV viewing of the moon landing with her vaguely untroubled observation of her mother’s alcoholism. —The Splendor of Orchids— is a kind of one-step-forward/two-steps-back narrative, in which we watch the inner confusions that overtake Claire, a young garden- catalogue copywriter living by herself in New York, once she decides to end her affair with a married man: —It had been two weeks since they—d broken up, but she still found herself looking for one of Kenneth’s stray socks under the sofa, a tie draped over the back of a chair.—Another memory play is —Bees for Honey,— a grown man’s recollection of a disturbed childhood playmate and his awareness of the guilt that haunts him over his role in the accident that precipitated her final breakdown. Intimate glimpses of family tension are found in —What Her Sister Wanted— (two girls and their mother wait uncomfortably for their divorced father’s appearance at the younger sister’s birthday party) and —Tell Me Something I Don—t Know— (after the death of his mother, a son descends into petty crime and hooliganism). —Like This—describes a recovering addict’s attempts to stay clean, whereas —Careful— presents the tentative efforts of two graduate students to make their relationship work—though they begin to see the impossibility of it during one camping vacation. Pretty thin gruel: well-crafted and meticulous, but not much of a meal—nor our idea of a feast.
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-922811-40-7
Page Count: 168
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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
SEEN & HEARD
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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