Altogether, a talented newcomer, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award. (See Desaulniers, above.)
Eight stories in a first collection, lightened by buoyant wit.
In “Such a Big Mr. England,” a new grandfather regrets that his son and daughter-in-law have chosen the day of Princess Diana’s funeral to bring his new granddaughter from California to visit: He’s getting phone calls from friends, who consider him an authority on the royal family, and this brings him greater satisfaction than being grandpa of “an ugly baby.” His daughter-in-law displays her own resentments in a not-so-subtle manner. The swiftly moving “Bike New York!” finds Derek, 30, the weekend before his wedding, failing to meet buddies for a 42-mile trek through New York City. Instead, he rides with a high-school junior named Serena, who leads him off-track to her parents’ bakery, shows him catalogues of wedding cakes and her own portfolio of photographs, and leaves him with a shimmering memory “as he slipped from the point of focus in his own life.” “The Marrying Kind” brings an awkward situation—a woman who has had a last fling with a former boyfriend arrives at his wedding knowing she’s pregnant with his child—to a not entirely satisfying end, and “Our Little Lone Star,” about a woman of 62 driving west during tornado warnings, has too-pat a wrap-up. The title piece presents an ensemble of voices—Janie, just home with her first baby; her husband, Jeff; best friend Hazel, and her baby brother, T.J., who’s also Hazel’s lover—all reflecting on love and marriage. This time, Feitell accomplishes a splashy close that pulls everything together: “Above the beach the small plane chugs and tilts, the underbelly catching a ray of sun and zapping it toward Manhattan, toward Jersey, Ohio, California. . . . [There] is a moment of weightless stall. Think of it! That one moment! Where is the time for indecision? Here on earth, beneath low-flying planes, there are birthdays, and bike rides, feet slipping into shoes.”
Altogether, a talented newcomer, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award. (See Desaulniers, above.)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-87745-911-8
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
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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