The late poet and performance artist left behind these seven stories, most of themhave published previously in literary magazines, and all of them relying on a similar narrative voice: a middle-aged divorcÇe in California. Moody and overwrought, Luria-Sukenick's tales often involve turbulent emotions and events recollected in tranquility. In ``Falling,'' a bitter divorcÇe talks to her cat about her ex- husband, a composer who lied about his infidelities; in ``Still Life With Bath,'' a woman indulges in a long bath and recalls her fun-loving ex-lover, a musician 12 years her junior who was interested in having kids. The much-reprinted ``Do You Know The Facts of Life? (Quiz)'' is a story in the form of a Q&A that roams over past loves, the loss of a husband, and childhood sexuality. ``After the Rains Only the Shadow Knows'' lingers on the impermanence of things, especially in California, with its earthquakes, mudslides, and inconstant lovers; the poet narrator worries about her father back East, then takes refuge in typical West Coast nostrums: crystals, astrology, acupuncture. ``Under Malathion'' finds the same narrator at a women writer's conference, where she and her colleagues fret about the environment, pornography, and Nestle's purchase of Celestial Seasonings. The long ``What Is Lost, What Is Missing, What Is Gone'' exiles the narrator from her beloved Santa Cruz to teaching in San Diego, where, after the news of the big earthquake, she worries about her house: She travels home to survey the damage and has an out-of-body experience linked to her own rediscovery of her Jewish roots. These sleepy tales of flighty women heap on the images and similes: ``They had danced like wands: like waves, like semaphores, had made love like pistons that night, a real screwing.'' But there's no actual concern with form or meaning in pieces that read like extended personal ads from The New York Review of Books.
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-944072-76-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997
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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