Segal is a monumental writer, one of the finest of her generation; this lovely collection is a fine introduction to her work.
A retrospective collection from an illustrious writer’s long career.
Segal (Half the Kingdom, 2013, etc.) was 10 when she was sent, by Kindertransport, from Vienna to England. Eventually, she and what was left of her family made their way to New York. Now in her 90s, Segal’s still there and long overdue for a retrospective of her writing. This is a spectacular volume. It collects excerpts from Segal’s major novels with short stories and essays, some new, some previously uncollected. Throughout her long career, Segal has returned again and again to the biographical impetus that launched it: Her first novel, Other People’s Houses (excerpted here), draws directly from her childhood flight to England and subsequent life with various foster families. Other pieces reflect an abiding interest in Jane Austen, racial inequality, and aging: One particularly delightful story describes an elderly woman at a party for which she can’t quite remember the occasion, or the hostess. As it turns out, it’s not a party after all. In all of these pieces, Segal’s prose is exquisite—crystalline, clear, and utterly unsentimental. In a chapter excerpted from her 1985 novel, Her First American, Segal describes a group of friends—some black, some white—who summer together in a large house in the 1950s. These scenes can be wickedly funny, and excruciatingly awkward, as the well-intentioned white characters bumble around. Segal is critical of liberal white hypocrisy but never cruel to her characters—whatever their race or religion.
Segal is a monumental writer, one of the finest of her generation; this lovely collection is a fine introduction to her work.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61219-747-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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