Experimental, postmodern and quirky.
Three longer short stories and one hundred very short stories, all about what comes before, during or after an end—of a relationship, the world or some conflation of the two.
The book’s long, titular work is a series of short works, some just a few lines long. Many are curiosities. With their toneless tone, they read like in-jokes, the meaning tied so deeply to their constituencies that the rest of us won’t find them funny. One of the shortest, entitled “For Real,” is a single sentence: “Slowly, carefully, gingerly, I began to suspect I remained ironical.” Corin (The Entire Predicament, 2007, etc.) is serious about her irony but not ironic about what, if anything, she takes seriously. The irony of considering anything other than the end of the world as apocalyptic makes it hard to see how we are to evaluate stories in which almost nothing happens, unless we are to reflect on the loss of action and agency. Even if limited, Corin is inventive. It’s possible that she is working within a set of constraints, that she is a member of the constituency that finds her in-jokes funny and chooses not to explain or elaborate why. In the three longer stories (“Eyes of Dogs” is a version of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Tinderbox”), situations develop and characters emerge as more than tics or habits of speech. Then Corin’s elliptical style becomes her greatest asset: Strangeness becomes estranging, unsettling.
Experimental, postmodern and quirky.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-938073-33-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
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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