Decently done but unremarkable debut collection, the recipient of this year’s Flannery O—Connor Award for Short Fiction. Most of the characters here—many of them Mormons, almost all living in the American Southwest—are either sick or connected intimately with sickness or tragedy. How they face the distress at hand becomes a measure of their character. Cecil, the nose surgeon of “Howard Johnson’s House,” has to carry on with his daily routine of facial reconstructions even as his mother Edna lies dying, beyond his assistance. Anna and Nicole, the two teenaged cancer patients of “Krista Had a Treble Clef Rose,” carry on with all the normal occupations of adolescence—crushes on boys, preparations for dances, fantasies about their futures—from the oncology ward of the hospital where they—ve met. “A Good Paved Road” describes a religious dilemma: a high school girl tries to convert her boyfriend to the Mormon Church she grew up in, then loses her faith when she fails. And in “Victor’s Funeral Urn,” a recently divorced wife who’s contemplating a reunion with her ex-husband happens upon an urn containing what appear to be human ashes on the side of a road—and then tries to locate the owner. “Jumping” finds a woman still haunted by a skiing accident 33 years after the fact. The best of the lot is the title story, describing the dual traumas of a husband being treated for thyroid cancer and of the wife whose exhaustion over his disease prompts her to leave him. Clyde knows her world well and manages to offer a fair representation of it, but there’s a lack of depth to her sketches that make them seen like just that—quick studies.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8203-2049-8
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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