Though Chiusano proves himself a skilled storyteller, connections to Marine Park limit rather than unite these stories. A...
The 17 stories in Chiusano’s debut collection center on the people and events in a remote neighborhood of southeast Brooklyn.
Many of these stories feature family dramas and childhood memories with several recurring characters, most notably two brothers, Lorris and Jamison. Chiusano paints a vivid portrait of Marine Park, a strangely provincial portion of the city. An eccentric neighbor pets the children’s heads in “Palming,” the brothers ride the bus alone to buy Christmas presents in “Open Your Eyes,” and the same barber cuts residents' hair for years in “Haircut.” At their strongest, the stories uncover forgotten truths of youth, as when the narrator of “Air-Conditioning” remembers the “spring of people breaking their wrists.” But the quiet tales bleed into each other, and the scenes and characters soon feel too familiar. When Chiusano does break his established patterns, he finds varying levels of success. “Vincent and Aurora” opens with the routines of an older married couple but takes a surprising, action-packed twist that reads like a thriller and feels out of place. “Clean,” a similar misfit, follows the outbreak and spread of a strain of herpes among a group of friends in the 1970s. On the other end of the spectrum is “We Were Supposed,” a stylistic standout. The two-page story of run-on sentences is a litany of lost opportunities that builds a mosaic of a life unlived. “We were supposed to go see a movie, get coffee, return calls, kiss, be alone, share a meal together…” it begins. “Shatter the Trees and Blow Them Away” also benefits from deviating from the standard, traveling farthest from the titular setting. The story occurs in New Mexico at the testing facility for the atomic bomb during World War II. The love story that unfolds, while predictable, is told in stunning language and is a refreshing change from the typical themes of Chiusano’s work.
Though Chiusano proves himself a skilled storyteller, connections to Marine Park limit rather than unite these stories. A reader begins to wish Chiusano, like his characters, could break free.Pub Date: July 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-14-312460-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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