After the mixed reception of his first novel, Fishboy (1993), Richard returns to his strong suit, short fiction (The Ice at the Bottom of the World, 1989): stories (all have appeared previously in high-profile venues) that display a singular talent, with a rich and versatile style, ranging from tough-guy lyricism to the more defining tales of sad and forgotten children. Such is the title piece: the abandoned boys on a hospital charity ward transform themselves into wild animals in order to escape the horrors of their lives (in a modern turn on Ovidian metamorphosis). The other boys on a similar ward, in —The Birds for Christmas,— have a much simpler desire: to watch Hitchcock’s shocker on Christmas Eve. —Gentleman’s Agreement— relies on a mean parent to provide the pathos: a forest firefighter who submits his disobedient son to some cruel lessons. In a more surreal mode, Richard cooks up a little voodoo on the bayou, when —Death— argues with a little boy, who mistakenly assumes the reaper has come for his feverish brother. Meanwhile, the lowlife tales here rely more on the accumulation of scuzzy details: —Where Blue is Blue,— full of freaks and grotesquerie—and also a perfect film scenario—is told by a boozy, glue-sniffing no-count who helps a buddy rig a fishing contest, and also cover-up the murder of a sideshow contortionist. Also set at the seashore, —Fun at the Beach,— is a wild fantasy of white-trash antics mixed with vampirism. Richard forms a single sentence (—Charming I Br, Fr.dr. wndws, quiet, safe. Fee—) into a menacing and manic narrative about insomnia. —Plymouth Rock,— on the other hand, is in the voice of a drunk loser who still lives at home, and hangs around in a Jetsons robe all day while his brother works for the Secret Service and considers him a security risk. Whether goofy and substance addled, or strangely naive, Richard’s original voices invite you into a world that’s both sad and surreal, and always worth the stay.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-42562-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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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