Outlaw writing for the fearless.
Woronov’s dazzling command of metaphor and surrealism makes for her best yet: stories about women staggering under unbearable emotional baggage and seeking love by walking into walls.
Not to suggest that Woronov can’t write about men with searing insight and more vigor than most male writers can. Still, of the ten or so males drawn here, not one might really be called a man in full, admirably virile and loving. All fall short under the gaze of Woronov’s naked brain, and this brings about an imbalance in the women as well. The author’s last outing, Niagara (2002), joined bits and pieces into a whole but lacked the focus of Snake (2000), a novel magnetized to the disjoinings of schizophrenia. Here, Woronov’s tales allow her to go with her strengths—instantly grasped characters seen with relentless poetic intensity. The first three pieces swim in place, a calm before the reader is hurled into the amazing “The Amazon,” whose characters and description bring Woronov to her most impressive: “The surface of the river was brown, opaque as mud. I had been duly warned of what lived down there: don’t put your hand in, the piranhas might be hungry; don’t swim in it, there’s a heatseeking worm that will swim up your butt and he won’t stop moving upwards till he bores through your brain and kills you; there are more infections and parasites than are catalogued by man. The smooth brown skin of the water looked like it was standing still, but underneath she was running towards the ocean carrying over a billion varieties of death in her bouquet, a bride with a death head grinning from beneath her veil. But don’t all brides have skulls grinning just beneath their skin?” Also outstanding: “The Alligator Man,” “My Name Is Helen,” and the stunning “Wall Street.”
Outlaw writing for the fearless.Pub Date: March 18, 2004
ISBN: 1-85242-807-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
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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