When Poirier drops the cleverness, he can delve powerfully into characters dangerously out of touch with themselves.
On the heels of his first novel (Goats, 2001), Poirier returns with a second story collection (after Naked Pueblo, 1999) centered, as the title implies, on offbeat entrepreneurs and their descendants.
In “Buttons,” the docent at a small-town museum depicting the history of the Badde family’s business tells visitors about Zilo Badde IV, a nerdy geek with a large sexual appetite who competes with twin Tommy for their grandfather’s affection. The brothers create a brief supermarket sensation with F’neggs, prepackaged eggs, but ultimately Zilo IV fails in both business and love. “A Note on the Type” also features an unpleasant young protagonist: Simon lives with his socially ostracized maiden aunt to save money, but it becomes apparent that he is as much of a misfit as she is. In “Gators,” narrator Vaughn’s obsession with Durina, a teenaged girl he tutors, lies just on the safe side of erotic. Durina’s mother sells alligator skins to shoe designers, and Durina plans to go to New York to try her hand at designing. Vaughn dreams of helping her and is crushed when she doesn’t need him. “Pageantry” adds little to our understanding of the beauty contest industry. A young girl pretends she participates only to please her disfigured mother, but we know better. Finest of the five stories in this thin volume is the beautiful, deeply sad “Worms.” Here, Poirier allows its central character to show humanity within his eccentricity. Raised by an aunt after a freak car accident killed his immediate family, Billy Hair is a simple country boy. He meets his future wife Dora, a reporter, when she interviews him about his worm farm, produced by “a wonderful accident” when he flooded the manure pasture. Billy and Dora, a Vassar-educated WASP, make a wildly improbable yet charming couple. But after their child accidentally drowns, their marriage collapses.
When Poirier drops the cleverness, he can delve powerfully into characters dangerously out of touch with themselves.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7868-6827-9
Page Count: 144
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2002
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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