Swan achieves the best possible of historical tones, neither nostalgic nor sentimental, but simply matter of fact, making...
Canadian Swan debuts with a wonderful collection of 13 stories and a novella.
“It began to seem, after a time, that everyone had something. One thing they’d seen or heard that they couldn’t shake off, that they carried, would carry forever, like a hard, dull stone in the heart.” The quote refers to Swan’s odd gathering of recollections and remembrances—each titled, like a story collection within a story collection—making up the life story of twin girls who seem bent on self-destruction. World War II is included, through letters and testimonials, as the girls, by now women, take part in the war effort only to wind up, at war’s end, committing the desperate act foretold in the beginning. The title piece, a 2001 O. Henry winner, is really a novella—like, say, Tobias Wolff’s “The Barracks Thief”—at least to the extent that it’s a perfect expression of the form. Other “stories,” though, include “Max—1970,” about a young man whose suburban stupor is exacerbated by his father’s trying to teach him how to fix an unbroken washing machine; “In the Story That Won’t Be Written,” about a divorced woman, lamenting the growth of her daughter and her ex’s new life, who tries to find an analogy for her own life in an old photograph that doesn’t offer up a meaningful narrative; and “The Manual of Remote Sensing,” giving a litany of men who come in an out of a woman’s orbit, leaving her with a kind of clairvoyance (“Watching him leave she knew with a sick certainty that he wouldn’t come back, that he would leave her there, lingering over a cold cup of coffee . . . . ”). The characters here often immerse themselves in the past, so it’s no surprise that suicide by water is a recurrent theme.
Swan achieves the best possible of historical tones, neither nostalgic nor sentimental, but simply matter of fact, making her tales of the past ultimately timeless.Pub Date: April 8, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50851-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
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
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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