A collection of short stories, often short short stories, which travel all around the world but retain the same timeless constants. Revelations, memories, or "moments full of cognizance and dream vision"—these are strong undercurrents while death is never far behind or ahead. In the title story an "ill-fitting refugee" serves as a patrol in Israel where he is spooked into shooting a dove—a dove that dies alone and unattended, perhaps like the wife he has lost. The closest to fable is "A Jew of Persia" who comes down from his clear mountains to be enclosed in the heat and filth of Tel Aviv where he waits silently to make his long-anticipated confrontation with the devil. The aged appear in more than one piece—the old man who affirms that the greatness in this world is God's doing; or the elderly Father Trelew who goes from Arizona to Rome to die, too quickly to achieve a perspective on his life. There's the commemorative "Katrina, Katrin," remembered by the young man who spent her last night trying to fulfill her last wish; of the woman in "Shooting the Bar" whose resentment of her husband who had sailed all over is only appeased when he crosses that bar for the last time. "On 'The White Girl' by Whistler" contains the lines which truly define Helprin's talent and intent: a "man who traded all for essences and captured everything in color." All Helprin's stories deal with essences which lead from the heart, and his images are clean and sharp and bright.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0156031019
Page Count: 194
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1975
BOOK REVIEW
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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