Fine storytelling that achieves universality while remaining rooted in a particular time and place.
Love troubles roil the lives of Mexican-Americans in ten superbly grounded stories.
They live on the wrong side of the tracks in a small Valley town near Fresno, Calif. They clean houses, do maintenance work at the paper mill. They suffer under “the fists of daily living,” and their marriages are “as tenuous as spiderwebs.” Several of the men are gay, which makes an awkward fit with their lives as sons and brothers and neighbors. Nobody realizes this more painfully than Sergio in “The Comeuppance of Lupe Rivera.” His gorgeous acquaintance Lupe has a succession of boyfriends, and when her married lover is stabbed by his wife’s brother, the neighbors try to intervene; those same neighbors stay out of sight when Sergio’s ex-boyfriends harass him. In “The Heart Finds Its Own Conclusion,” Sergio’s tenderhearted cousin Cecilia waits for him outside a bus station in Fresno, but she’s unable to save him from the vicious lover he’s fleeing. The complex negotiations between gay and straight society are depicted with particular subtlety in “Ida y Vuelta.” The decent Roberto had been extraordinarily helpful to his undeserving lover Joaquín, so the latter’s family allowed their gratitude to mask their deep distaste for the relationship. Muñoz (Zigzagger, not reviewed) also looks at parent/child interactions. “When You Come into Your Kingdom” is a moving study in thwarted paternal love: Following his son’s suicide, which he had provoked, Santiago acknowledges their shared loneliness. In the title story, Emilio’s father nurses him tenderly after his legs are crushed in a forklift accident. Connie cannot save her 17-year-old son Isidro, mortally wounded by a motorcycle accident in “Lindo y Querido,” but she does come to accept his love for the boy he rode with, now also dead.
Fine storytelling that achieves universality while remaining rooted in a particular time and place.Pub Date: May 4, 2007
ISBN: 1-56512-532-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
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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