Bluntly powerful but deeply nuanced stories from a unique voice in American fiction.
An unsettling group portrait of victimized young women whose survival on the margins of American life is its own best, or worst, reward.
Boasting three new stories and selections from Girls in the Grass (1991) and First, Body (1997), this overview captures Thon at her tough, unremittingly intense, unflinching best. In settings ranging from Native American Montana to blue-collar Boston to a Georgia plantation in the 1850s, we are ushered into a bleak world of hard backseat sex and trailer-park traumas, unreported killings and numbing Vietnam flashbacks, heartless punishments and backcountry skirmishes that wouldn't be out of place on Elmore Leonard's Kentucky-set F/X series, Justified. "You have to believe something's going to happen" says the protagonist of one of the earliest stories, Iona Moon, but what happens in this book never lives up to her vision of bright lights illuminating the night. "Father, Lover, Deadman, Dreamer" is about a teenage girl who drunkenly runs over a Native American man and is forever haunted by efforts to conceal the crime. "Heavenly Creatures" is a multipart mini-epic about three half-siblings with different fathers and a mother in prison for fencing stolen bicycles. In "Punishment," a young female slave who witnesses a rape kills the baby she is brought in to nurse. Thon writes in short, jabbing, bruising sentences, never letting up on her verbal attack. Her words can be fiercely poetic or streaked with mysticism. If there's a drawback to her stories (she also has written four novels), it's that her thin-hipped, flat-chested girls are largely interchangeable. Only the source of their psychological scarring changes, ranging from incest to drug dependence to missing and/or alcoholic fathers and mothers. But that doesn't diminish the boldness or originality of this increasingly impressive body of work.
Bluntly powerful but deeply nuanced stories from a unique voice in American fiction.Pub Date: May 24, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-55597-585-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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
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
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