Dubiously substantial enough for an entire volume, though two or three well worthy entrants help carry the rest along.
From Gavell (1919–67), 16 mostly rural stories, many set in the south of Texas where she was born.
Kaye Gibbons calls Gavell’s work “magnificent,” places it in the “ageless, classic grand era” of the American short story and declares its life-blood to come from its use of “our regional language.” It’s true that the pieces—all perfectly honed—do evoke the classic tones of, say, Eudora Welty or Katherine Anne Porter. But at the same time they’re often thin to the point of anemia or familiar enough to seem more antique than classic. At her best, Gavell is very good, as in “The Rotifer” (included in The Best American Short Stories for 1968 and in the best of the century in 2000), an adept placing together of three disparate but similar moments in a young woman’s life. Elsewhere, though, she relies on melodramatic extremes of character to push a story into being at the cost of psychological depth, as in “Penelope,” where a middle-class girl gives a gift to poor Mexicans; “Lois in the Country,” about an almost perversely reserved and cautious mother; or “His Beautiful Handwriting,” about a schoolteacher whose well-known mentor was insensitive and bigoted. Sometimes the stories remain at the level of little more than anecdote, as do “Yankee Traders” (a couple goes antiquing) and the title story (a schoolboy tells his mother he needs a play costume—the next day). Still, in execution Gavell never stumbles, and when her ambitions rise to the level of her abilities, the results can be notable—as in the elegantly simple closing tale, “The Blessing,” about belief, marriage, and the nature of dedication over three generations of a rural Texas family.
Dubiously substantial enough for an entire volume, though two or three well worthy entrants help carry the rest along.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50612-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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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